


Your Name Remains Within Me

by hellhoundtheory



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:36:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1955325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellhoundtheory/pseuds/hellhoundtheory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier fulfills a hit on the Democratic Party's golden child, Senator Amesbury, before the presidential primary. The Avengers are called to take in the notorious assassin, but the revelation of the Winter Soldier's identity reveals a  more insidious plot within SHIELD. The team struggles against Hydra's plot to ruin the Avengers' reputation while still trying to defend the world and keep their leader's will from cracking under the pressure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

He doesn’t breathe for fear of disturbing the air around him. He brings his eye back to the sight, finger twitching around the trigger. He squeezes with index finger, letting out his breath as the butt of his Soviet-made sniper rifle jerks into his shoulder. 

The Winter Soldier doesn’t flinch. He packs up his gear quietly and leaves the rooftop, the sound of sirens and the screaming crowd a memory behind him.

When he meets his handler at the rendezvous point he lets them erase the sounds from his memory, only vaguely recollecting that his assignment was an American senator campaigning in the primary of the presidential elections, and that he completed it. Anything beyond that was unnecessary. Wiped away.

There’s something about him doing good for his country, the words that always follow him into sleep, but he doesn’t remember a country or serving a nation. Just a stiff metal chair and people in lab coats and biting down on rubber until they make it all go away.

~

Their briefing that week was a dire thing, filled with morose faces and eyes tired from watching the news nonstop.

“Man, I supported her campaign,” Tony sighs into his palm, “She was nice. She personally called all her donors to thank them, no matter how small the donation. I went to her campaign office once. She actually knew all the names of the kids volunteering for her.”

“I would have voted for her,” Steve agrees, thumb stroking back and forth under his chin thoughtfully as he stares at the picture on the report. Shot right through the center of her forehead, brains and blood spattered, but otherwise a clean hit. The pattern of gore would have almost reminded him of Bucky’s work from the war, from when his best friend had his back with a rifle and a grin, if the bullet hadn’t been identified as an unrifled Soviet make. There were no shell casings left on the rooftops nearby. This was professional. 

“Now that we all agree that Senator Amesbury was a good American and an even better person, let’s get around to stopping this from happening to anyone else.” Nick Fury may be a great man, but he is never one to ponder over what if’s and would have’s. 

“Why should it happen to anyone else?” Banner supplies helpfully, “Most Democrats are going to suspect that her opponent took out the hit on her, and an old white Republican man will be the President again, since we’ve got two of those on the other bill. No more Democratic vice grip on the Republican caucus’ balls. No more liberal black president.”

Fury sighs, “Yes, thank you Dr. Banner. But someone did this and it’s our job to find out.”

Clint raises his hand barely, as a courtesy, mouth already open and speaking, “But why is it _our_ job? I care as little as anyone about cop politics and jurisdictions, but I know that this is the job for the Secret Service and MPDC.”

Natasha answers the question, “Because this hit was made by a ghost.”

Nodding, Fury agrees, “And I think you know which ghost, Agent Romanoff.”

Her voice is unbearably even, tinged with something like reminiscence, “They call him the Winter Soldier.” Clint lets out a low whistle. Tony sits up from his usual slouch, and even Dr. Banner looks alarmed. Steve tries his best to hide his confusion, but Tony can already tell.

“Didn’t understand that reference?” Stark smirks, confidence oozing from every pore, “Well, think every major assassination since the Iron Curtain went up and every minor one too. I read once that it wasn’t Harvey Lee Oswald, but the Winter Soldier who brought down JFK. I mean, who else has a magic bullet but the Soviets, right? Oswald had the one bullet, but it was this guy who did the rest. In the grassy knoll, you know.”

Refraining from rolling her eyes, Natasha leans forward on the glass table, propping up her elbows, “Ignoring Tony’s conspiracy theory, the rest is true.”

“Even the magic bullet?” Clint says, smirking.

“As I said, ignoring the conspiracy theorist in the room, the Winter Soldier has killed plenty of people, including someone I was on a protection detail for in Iran. Shot through me to get to him. Bye-bye bikinis.”

“So he’s ruthless?” Steve says rhetorically as he flips through the file. No cameras ever got a good shot of him. Never left any evidence. A real damn ghost if there ever was one.

“200 kills in 50 years.” Fury says in a monotone, knowing that it wasn’t an answer, but an example.

“No offense to this great conspiracy, but wouldn’t he be,” Steve pauses, raising his eyebrows, “Closer to my age?”

Tony remains a dog with a bone, “See, there are two theories, my nonagenarian friend. Either there are multiple Winter Soldiers, or, or, or” He holds up a finger, knowing Natasha is going to interrupt him, “They freeze him between missions. Kinda like you, Cap, but he gets reheated once in a while.” 

Steve rolls his eyes, “Thanks for making me feel like leftovers.”

Tony gives a half-smile, “Anytime.”

Fury projects over them, “Anyways, children, that is why we are on this mission. Because this is the world’s most effective assassin, and we want him in our hands, not the Russians’.”

“With all respect, I don’t think the Russians have him.”

SHIELD agents and Avengers alike turn to Natasha. “While Putin might want a more conservative America to join his gay-hate parade, a Republican president doesn’t change the fact that the court system is overturning laws banning gay marriage left and right. And,” She pauses, “Not all of the Winter Soldier’s hits have benefitted them in the past ten years.”

“All his confirmed kills have,” Agent Hill retorts, comparing the possible kill list to the confirmed kill list, “In fact, his last confirmed kill was your guy.”

Natasha shakes her head, “I think that the 2007 kills were him. And those were either Russians or Russian allies, a whole list of them.”

“What makes you say that?”

Her mouth quirks a little at the side, “Because, if I were an assassin, tortured and brainwashed in the Red Room, those are the first people I would go after. And one of my contacts said that in 2007, he was unfrozen for a mission, then went off orders when the mission went past thirty-six hours. Thus the killing spree, rather than isolated kills.”

A cheer comes from the other side of the conference room, where Tony is fiddling with his phone, at least, Steve thinks it’s a phone, “So he was a Winter Soldier. Literally!” The silence is filled with the vague impression of those at the table rolling their eyes.

Steve chews on the inside of his cheek, “Then why go after Amesbury? She only came on the political scene as a big-hitter recently, and has zero ties to Russia or the USSR before it.”

“Just because the scientists and supervisors are dead, doesn’t mean that the trigger words are. Since he didn’t decimate the entire KGB by the end of that year, someone must have gotten a hold of his programming.”

“So what makes you think it isn’t the Red Room again?” Banner questions, clearly suspicious of Natasha’s inability to explain her reasoning.

“I don’t want to say it’s a gut feeling. But I know how they operate. Big flashy kills on a campaign speech? Not them. That’s a wholly American type of showmanship.”

Tony has the gall to look offended for Steve, “You do realize that Cap here can’t hear that sort of talk or he’ll start selling you bonds, right? Where are the chorus girls?”

Steve can’t help but agree with the ex-Soviet assassin over Tony, king of American capitalism and gaudy, ostentatious displays. Only an American would want the attention of killing a Senator on the final days of their campaign for the Presidential primary, rather than quietly killing her right after she advanced onto the election, like Rob Kennedy. Given the list of confirmed kills, many of which looked like accidents or happened in the homes of the victims, it seemed to Steve that the Winter Soldier was not used for kills that were anything but efficient and quiet.

To Tony’s surprise Steve nods, concurring, “She’s right.” Even Fury looks a little shocked, though he could have just been passing gas for all Steve knew.

“The Winter Soldier was always supposed to be a ghost. He could have pulled this assassination right after Amesbury was elected as the Democratic candidate, but whoever controls him wanted to cast suspicion on her opponent, thus solidifying the race for the Republican who wins the primary. If they have a preferred candidate, they’ll probably rig it with a scandal, something easy enough to arrange in Washington. Then they get what they want.” Tony stopped fiddling with his phone, actually rapt with attention at Steve’s words. 

“What if the Democrats rally around O’Connor?” Clint asks, narrowing his eyes.

“Guy’s a slimeball. Even in his address mourning Amesbury, he looked like he was happy.” 

“Bruce is right,” Steve confirms, knowing that Clint knew the political field about as well as he knew how to wake up without coffee, which is to say, not at all, “He doesn’t make people comfortable. His polls have only been going down, even though the Amesbury campaign won’t present another candidate, he won’t make it against either Republican candidate.”

Agent Hill presents the question they’re all asking, “So if it isn’t Russia, and is definitely someone American, who is it?”

“John McCain?” 

“You’re still bitter over that?” Steve is lost on the conversation, having been a little preoccupied during the ’08 elections, but he figures out from a quick google on his phone that McCain insulted Stark industries, and, by extension, Tony, for pulling out of the weapons business.

They quickly turn their minds back to who could be controlling the Winter Soldier, but Steve isn’t much help. He understands the political events of today, but is still catching up on the last few years of Bush’s presidency. The thought half-forms in his mind that the team thinks he’s out of touch just because he’s only been out of the ice for a little while. But they had elections back in his day too, and there wasn’t much to do when you were sickly but read the paper and then use it for kindling when night came.

Their conference eventually broke for lunch, having already divided into groups, each with a different goal. Agent Hill and Stark were working on the political end of things—trying to find out who had the motivation and the ability to pull off the assassination. Fury had left for other duties, but it became clear as Steve finished reading the thick file that this was the most important big bad on SHIELD’s radar at the moment. 

_The man who shaped a century,_ Steve thinks regretfully, eyes tracing the blurred photographs of the masked Winter Soldier. _No wonder Fury wanted us on it._ It wasn’t enough of an alien invasion or giant city-destroying robot to bring in Thor, but the human component of the Avengers seemed to have the brains and brawn to untangle the history and potential moves of the Soldier.

Of course, Natasha and Clint were discussing how to take down this master assassin, watching all the captured videos of the man on the conference room screen, switching between Russian and English and—Arabic?—in order to best express their rather expert opinions. He and Banner were left the odd ones out, neither politically involved enough to know who could want Amesbury dead, nor violent enough to plan exactly how to take down the Winter Soldier. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Hulk, but the Big Guy was always a last resort; Steve didn’t usually do anything outside of fighting with his shield, so he was probably easier used as a distraction tactic so that Nat and Clint could incapacitate the Soldier. Steve expected they wanted the Soldier alive—an asset SHIELD would undoubtedly try to turn. The lack of something for them to do, naturally, meant that he and Banner were embroiled in a discussion about the psychology of the man himself. 

As he and Banner went through the—even longer—KGB file about the brainwashing done to him, Steve felt a kinship start to grow between him and this Winter Soldier. Another man out of time, pushed around by governments with his autonomy taken away at every opportunity. Banner chuckled mirthlessly at the way they described the Soldier: in inhuman terms of ‘it’ and ‘the subject,’ or even ‘the experiment.’ He said reading his own file was remarkably similar. Steve couldn’t help but sympathize, both as a government experiment, and as a guy who had been so small most people didn’t even consider him a man before Erskine’s experiment. 

According to the Natasha’s hunch, he and Banner dove into the files of the scientists and paper pushers who the Winter Soldier had killed in ’07. Steve’s chest tightened in sympathy after reading what they had done to this Winter Soldier, a man who had woken up without his own memories, but with ‘enhanced muscle memory’ that made training him in the Red Room’s ways simple, and ‘enhanced strength’ that made him deadly. There was an addendum to the file, something written in the margins that hadn’t been translated, but it was right before they started the brainwashing treatment. Steve could comprehend spoken Russian well enough—the serum had helped his brain as well as his body—but the written letters perplexed him still. He beckoned over Natasha who translated for him:

 _The subject is remembering himself. Violent flashbacks have led to the death of two handlers, and extreme measures will be taken to save the asset for its other utilities._ The lobotomizing of the Winter Soldier’s amygdala combined with local shock afterwards was already translated in great detail—too much detail. He and Natasha shared eye contact, both only too able to sympathize with their personal lives coming second to their skills. Bruce stared at the paper in blank, abject horror.

Natasha translated another note, _Subject’s brain tissue grows back after thirty-six hours, when he begins to disobey orders. After seventy-two hours, the asset begins remembering again. Full wipes after each mission should be anticipated for future handlers._ Well, he wasn’t so sure he and this Winter Soldier were that different. Steve wasn’t that good at following orders either. 

~  
They wake him up again, strapping him into clothes and putting his arm back on with a whirr and barely a wince from him. It looks like skin this time, something he instinctively knows means he’s going undercover. He hadn’t done that in longer than he could remember. They tell him the date and he hides his surprise that it’s only been a week easily, internalizing any commentary on the briefing with the same blank mask he always wears. As they force shoes onto his feet, he expects the heaviness of combat boots and the weight of leather against his skin. They are light, excepting the knife in the sole of one and the garrote and tracker in the others. Someone drapes plastic over his shoulders and light snipping fills his ears as pieces of wet hair fall to his shoulders. A dim part of him realizes that they hadn’t done that since 1963. 

“Are you sure he can do this?”

“He’s an assassin not some sort of—”

“It’s in all their training. It says so in the key, just give him the trigger words and it’s like you flip a switch and he’s, you know.”

“Charming?”

~  
“It’s a week before the vote. And there’s a charity benefit.” Tony says, apropos of nothing as they start the briefing. After being called in the week before, the Avengers had been relegated to the position of ‘on call’ when it became clear that the assassin wasn’t going to strike again. But Stark had been working with Agent Hill and the other politics-savvy agents of SHIELD to discern exactly who was behind the assassination. Steve assumed that this meeting was the culmination of that effort.

“So what?” Trust Clint to say what they’re all thinking, as he walks into the meeting with coffee in hand.

“Well, Stevie-boy was right.”

“Don’t call me that,” he sighs.

“Anyways, when you said they wanted a scandal, Cap, you were…” He blows air out of his mouth, spreading his hands, “So correct. And it’s the perfect time to seduce the closeted Republican into a hotel room and take pictures of it.” Tony seems extremely proud of himself. Steve understands that politics are vicious, it was that way back in his day too, but he’ll never grasp the need to pull someone’s personal life into a political debate. It seems underhanded. 

“That’s not really going to help us get the Winter Soldier,” Banner says, thinking out loud. Steve can’t help but agree. The guy is a killing machine with—if the blurry photos are to be believed—a metal arm. Not exactly discreet.

“All our potential suspects are invites. Hell, even I was invited. The press will be mingling with the socialites at this one, and Stern is there, and we all know he’s hiding some sort of secret. Even if the Winter Soldier isn’t going to be getting in the Senator’s pants, he’ll be standing by to kill the guy who is. Make it look like a cover-up.”

Natasha makes a hesitant noise. 

“What?” Tony looks up with wide eyes, thinking he’s going to be derailed by the spy.

“It’s in his training. The Winter Soldier. He isn’t always a sniper. There have been plenty of bodies left on hotel beds over the years. The Red Room knows the benefit of a pretty face, and whoever has control of him knows it too.” Steve hadn’t exactly gotten ‘pretty’ from behind the mask and sunglasses, but apparently Natasha had a little more experience with the Soldier sans mask.

“He speaks ten different languages with local accents. Including English.” Agent Hill says, corroborating Natasha’s theory with facts.

“What if he’s not Stern’s type?” Banner asks with a half-smirk. It’s a joke, but it’s far from a stupid question.

Natasha huffs a laugh, “The training makes you anyone’s type.”

“So now that we’ve determined that the intel is as solid as I told you it was… Who’s going to be my plus one?” 

When Stark’s eyes meet Natasha’s she bows out. The Soldier would likely recognize her; he did shoot her once, after all. SHIELD can easily get invitations, so it’s not as if any of them has to be Stark’s date. Clint is delegated to providing safety for Stern in case the Soldier’s objective is to kill him, so he will be rooftop hopping, as per usual. That leaves him and Banner. Steve thinks blithely that he probably already has an invitation to the thing, unopened in his recycle bin. Banner promises to be on standby with Romanoff.

“My party trick usually gets people hurt.”

That leaves Steve. And he really wished there was anyone else to take his place.

“Buck up, Cap. It’s for the veterans anyways. Old farts like you.” Steve closes his eyes and tries not to think of all the times Bucky had told him to buck up when he was sick and made them laugh themselves silly until Steve was wheezing. Tony’s eyes soften at the pinched look on his face. While he and Stark didn’t get along on the best of days, the history Steve shared with Tony’s father means that Tony knows all about his soft spots. It wasn’t like it happened that long ago for Steve, either. Three years isn’t enough time to get over the death of the only constant in one’s life, and Steve is great at making himself busy so that he doesn’t think about it. Except in his nightmares. 

However, Tony is right. It turns out the benefit is for veterans, not for ‘old farts’ but those who had recently come back and suffered the ‘invisible wounds of war,’ as the heartbreaking advert called them. They called it PTSD. Back in his day it had been shellshock, and, at that point, you could still get executed for it in England—they called it cowardice, malingering. But now there was a name for it and they said there wasn’t any shame in it. But, as he entered the foyer of the fancy hotel he could pick out those who had served and those who were there to schmooze and play off their sympathy for political reasons. Obviously there were the uniforms as identifiers, but the veterans had the same air as him. Uncomfortable in the sight of grandeur and pomp, torn between disgust and disbelief.

True to his prediction, Steve had been invited to the party, listed as Captain America of course. Because he wasn’t—couldn’t be—a normal vet like all the other guys here—he was a living legend. Apparently.

He didn’t wear a uniform, instead opting for whatever tux had been whipped up for him by a combination of Tony’s tailor and probably more money than he and Bucky had ever had before the war. Steve wouldn’t know what uniform to wear anyways—all his SSR dress greens were in the Smithsonian, and he didn’t technically even serve a branch of the military, even as a Howling Commando. Tony bemoaned the fact that Colonel Rhodes was not attending. Steve agreed with his displeasure, having looked forward to meeting the Iron Patriot—or was it War Machine?—for some time. But they weren’t here to make nice and Steve could meet Tony’s friend another time.

Tony abandoned him so that he could pretend his typical party boy act, albeit more respectfully than usual, given the occasion. Steve gravitated towards the bar, thinking of all the movies he had seen recently. If there was a place to ‘pick up’ a Senator, like the Soldier was supposed to, he would guess that the bar was it. Even if it wasn’t, he had a vantage point on the whole place. 

“You look like a man who could use a drink,” someone said next to him.

“Not that it would help, but I am definitely not cut out for this kind of party.” The man next to him wore a navy Air Force uniform with the kind of stiffness that showed he would be more comfortable in his usual gear than the dress uniform.

“So, where are your duds? ‘Cause I know a vet when I see one, and you look like the kinda guy who saw some shit and won some medals.”

He laughs into the bourbon that appeared in his hand—it was a free bar and a finger of the stuff was probably still worth more than a full tank of premium gas for his bike. “Well, the medals I did get, I never saw. And there were men and women I knew that should have had them instead.”

“Sam Wilson, I’m a counselor over at the nearby veteran’s center,” the man sticks out his hand, and Steve takes it, finding the handshake firm and not too lingering, but far from impersonal. He met the man’s eyes and knew he had seen some shit too—to use his term.

“Steve Rogers.” Sam Wilson’s eyes nearly bug out of his head, and Steve is glad the other man hadn’t been taking a drink because that would have been a very expensive spit take.

“For real?” He whistles, “Man, you should drop by when I’m at work. Make me look real cool. 

Grinning, Steve is about to make a reply when he spots someone across the crowd. It’s like seeing a ghost and he half-wonders if Buck hadn’t knocked up some dame before shipping out and this was his grandkid but Steve would be damned if the lookalike wasn’t talking to Stern. _Flirting_ with Stern.

“Uh. I’m sorry. I’m kind of on a mission. Thing. Else I wouldn’t be here, you know. But it was nice to meet you, Sam Wilson. And I will, drop by.” He tries not to sound dismissive. The guy was actually nice, and it would be great to have friends who understood the reality of serving, waking up with nightmares, the whole nine.

But there was a man who looked like his best friend leaving with Stern and Steve needed to _know_ if he was just hallucinating or if he was actually seeing James Buchanan Barnes reincarnate. And it was also his mission. He clicks on his communicator, touching his ear gently.

“Stern is taking the Southwest exit with a man, 5’11”…” Maybe he was taller, but Steve said Bucky’s height anyways, “Medium brown hair, approximately 200 pounds, black tux. Couldn’t get a visual on his arm, may not be Winter Soldier.”

“You giving us stats or scoping out a date for yourself, Cap?”

“Just get there, Stark. I’m following them now.”

Steve wanted to tail them closely, so he pulled out his cellphone and spoke into it, making it up as he went along, ignoring his own voice and straining to hear the doppelganger’s conversation with Stern.

When Hill said that the Winter Soldier spoke with local accents, Steve hadn’t expected the Brooklyn drawl of his best friend, using a flirtatious tone of voice Steve knew well from their many failed double dates. _It can’t be. He’s been dead for 70 years, there’s no way._

The Soldier, the Bucky lookalike, whoever it is pulls Stern into an alley. At this point Steve knows it isn’t a hit, and that stops him from barging into the confined space, where Bucky—the Soldier—has a hand down the Senator’s pants. Steve knows it’s crazy, but he switches his phone to camera-mode and takes a picture of the man who looks like Bucky—Steve wants to have proof that he’s not going insane. But it’s dark and he doesn’t know how to disable flash so the second after he takes the picture the phone is being whipped out of his hand and he’s realizing why the Winter Soldier is such an effective assassin.

“Bucky!”

He thinks to himself as he mindlessly parries and tries his best to avoid hurting the man who looks like Bucky—whose eyes shine in the half-light of a streetlamp the same clear citrine color as Bucky’s—that he shouldn’t have gone alone. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Steve can’t help but crumple at the lack of recognition, wishing someone else were here to fight for him, because he couldn’t possibly fight this man, even if it’s not his best friend. No sooner does he think that and feel the metal of the Soldier’s left hand bashing in his nose than the cavalry arrives.

Natasha’s jumping on top of him as lithely as a spider, zapping his neck with her wrist-mounted weapons to no avail, as she’s thrown off like an inexperienced rider on a wild horse. As Tony arrives with his suit and regalia all he can think is to shout into the comms not to hurt him.

It’s lost in the fray of battle. Orders were to take him alive anyways, but Steve knows that if the Hulk gets involved it might not be an option. An arrow releasing some sort of EMP lodges into the Winter Soldier’s left arm, making it useless. Luckily, Bruce never has to show, as Natasha clambers onto not-Bucky’s back again, whispering something in his ear that makes him fall to the ground underneath her.

Steve leans against the alley wall, palm finding his phone. The screen is cracked, but the phone works. When he unlocks it, Bucky’s face is plain as day in the photo. It couldn’t be anyone else. Not with that voice.

“You wanna tell me what you were doing, engaging the target like that, Cap?” Natasha says as she unfolds herself from next to the prone assassin’s form, where she was taking his pulse. Steve dimly recognizes the sound of a helicopter from overhead. 

“Why didn’t you tell us he had an off switch?”

“I asked you first.” Their eyes meet and Steve knows she won’t break first—or, well, ever.

“How about I tell you all as a team once we get back to HQ. It’s kind of a long story.”

“You were here for like a minute, how can it be a long story?” Tony asks, suit obscuring his voice. 

Steve clutches at his nose, feeling the cartilage knitting back into place under his fingers, “Because.”

He can almost hear Natasha roll her eyes, “To answer your question, I didn’t know if it would work.”

He nods and tries to stop the worry that worms his way into his chest at the bloodied face of his best friend in the dark of an alley. What if Natasha’s trigger had killed him or worse? 

“Um, what just happened?” Comes a quiet voice from behind a trashcan, where Senator Stern stumbles out. Tony’s facemask folds up and he claps the man gently on the back, leading him towards one of the SHIELD vans parked outside the mouth of the alley. 

Steve feels a little like a ticking bomb the way the team looks at him as they file into another conference room an hour later, one with a direct link to Bucky’s—the Winter Soldier’s—holding room. His eyes are fixed on the prostrate form of his best friend on a cot while the eyes of everyone in the room are on him.

“You have about a minute to explain this, Rogers, before I get you a similar room,” Fury says, and Steve knows it isn’t an idle threat.

“James Buchanan Barnes.”

Tony gives a low murmur of, “Holy shit,” and that’s about how Steve feels right now.

“American hero, member of the 107th, Howling Commandos sniper, died in 1945, shortly before yourself, James Buchanan Barnes?”

“Yes, sir.” 

Fury pushes a button on the console in the middle of the table, “I’m going to need a blood test of the Winter Soldier. Compare it to James Buchanan Barnes’ record. Rush it.”

“Um… Yes. That’ll be ten minutes sir,” He can hear the lab attendant typing and knows that the request to compare DNA with a dead man caused her confusion. 

Tony scoffs, “Slow-pokes.” 

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

They sit down. Steve stays standing, pacing around the room evenly. The lab attendant’s voice rings out, “It’s a positive match, sir. The Winter Soldier is, in fact, James Buchanan Barnes.”

Steve leans on the wall for support. He had almost hoped he was dreaming. Because he knew the Winter Soldier’s file backwards and forwards. And he knew Bucky could never live with what had been done to the Winter Soldier, with what he had done, as the Winter Soldier.


	2. Deux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team deals with the fallout of the Winter Soldier's identity.

“Sir, there’s something else.”

“How can there be something else?” Fury snaps back, as if an American hero brought back from the dead was more than enough.

“The Winter Soldier… Sergeant Barnes’ blood shows irregularities. Super soldier serum irregularities.”

“Do a full work-up on him. Make sure he’s restrained. Romanoff, do you know how long he’ll be out?”

“He could wake up any second, or not wake up until we give him the trigger word.”

“You know the wake-up call?”

She nods. 

“Tell Rogers and no one else. We don’t need anyone else knowing how to wake the dragon. To the rest of you, you’re dismissed.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Steve looks askance at Tony, standing there as if he had anything to offer to help Bucky.

“I can help with that arm. You never know what kind of kill switch could be lurking in it.”

“Did they check him for cyanide pills?” Natasha asks, looking calmer than Steve would have been saying the same thing. _Oh God what if that had been his mission. Worse than the Senator being gay would be him waking up in bed next to a dead man. But Bucky’s too valuable, whoever was controlling him wouldn’t have wasted him like that._ His thoughts are more than a jumble. 

“He was divested of everything but his arm before he even got in the building.”

“So the arm’s the only potential threat,” Stark confirms.

“And the Soldier himself.” Steve sits down and puts his head in his hands. _How is he even alive?_

“Agent Romanoff, check out his effects and bring what isn’t a weapon back up to Rogers. Stark, go see if you can prevent that arm from being a problem.”

Bruce speaks up, “I’d like to take a look at his blood panels.” Fury nods and they take their leave, Stark and Banner giving Steve sympathetic claps on the shoulder on the way out. He throws them all a grateful look. Clint silently walks off in the same direction as Natasha, presumably to keep her company. Or to compare gear with the Winter Soldier. 

Either way, he’s grateful that their makeshift team has his back, in their own special ways.

“So, Rogers, do you want to explain to me how your…”

“Best friend,” Steve supplies, not sure how familiar Fury is with his history. 

“Right. You wanna tell me how he’s alive?”

“If what your lab tech says is true, than he must have… survived the fall. Because he has a version of the serum.”

“And how did he come by that serum?” Somehow, Fury didn’t make this feel like an interrogation, but Steve still shifts uncomfortably in his seat as he thinks.

“Zola’s lab… they were doing experiments on the POWs. I rescued him from where he was strapped down to a table. They must have given him something.” Steve thinks back to every time he and Bucky had jokingly tussled between the rescue and his last mission, like old times. How Bucky wasn’t easily pushed around, never got hurt. Steve just figured the war had made the tough guy who kept him out of trouble even tougher, the lean muscle stronger, his resilience heightened. 

He had never thought— _No, that’s it. I never thought about him. About anything but the mission and taking down Hydra._ That wasn’t strictly true. Bucky was his best friend, Steve always thought about him. But Bucky’s safety had always been a constant in his life. Steve was the one who was always flinging himself in harm’s way, no matter what size he was. Bucky was the one who tempered him, who kept him from going too far.

_In all the time I spent staring at his stupid face I never thought for one second that the war had changed him. That Hydra had changed him._

“We didn’t have time to go back for the body,” Steve says, looking into his hands as if they had done something wrong. 

“Don’t blame yourself, Cap. But do prepare yourself. I think you know just as well as I do what kind of treatment your friend has been subjected to—I’d like to think he’s still in there, but it’s been seventy years. You need to be ready for the worst.”

“And what are you going to do if it is the worst?” Steve holds onto the hope hidden in the notes in the file, _the subject is remembering,_ but he knows better than to get his hopes up with SHIELD involved, “If Bucky’s not there will you take his shell and use him like those people used him?” His fists are clenched beneath the table. He knows Fury can be a good man, but when it comes to something he can use—well, Steve’s not holding out for him to be a saint.

“You are listed as his contact and medical proxy. According to DNA records he is James Buchanan Barnes. From here on out the decisions are yours until he can make his own decisions, whether _he_ is your friend or not.” Sighing in relief, Steve lets his body relax, slumping into the chair. The DC skyline outside the window of the conference room is lit brightly, even at one in the morning. It had been a long time since he had felt this tired.

“How about you go home, get a change and a shower. Might do you good.”

“But…” Steve hadn’t planned on going home. He was going to go right down and watch until his friend woke up or they were ready to wake him up.

“Do you want me to make that an order?” 

“Sir, we have the Soldier’s belongings.” Natasha walks in, followed by Clint, who is holding a neatly folded suit and polished shoes.

“What was he carrying?”

“Three knives, one concealed in the shoe, the other two removed by SHIELD personnel. Two garrotes, hidden in the suit and other shoe. One pistol, Soviet-make.”

“Where was that?” Natasha shakes her head and coughs. Clint’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Steve doesn’t want to know.

“I rescind my question. Anything that could lead us to his handlers?”

“Just a tracking device that was removed from his right arm.” _The flesh and bone one_ went unsaid, “It’s deactivated, but the techs are trying to see if they can use it to find them, but it doesn’t look to be sophisticated enough for a backwards feed.”

“What about his arm?”

Natasha gives a noncommittal shrug, “Tony’s working on that. All the holding cells are signal-dampening anyways, so that should avert anything his handlers might pull.” 

“I want to see him,” Steve declares, clutching onto the clothes as if they were actually Bucky’s posessions and not something his handlers had forced him to wear while pimping him out. He tries to ignore that they smell like Bucky, something he hadn’t known was a scent missing from his life until it filled his senses, dark like cigarette ashes and whiskey, but light like home. It smelled like home. But there was somehow less of it, as if living life as a ghost had dulled the vibrancy of his smell hiding Bucky’s scent just as brainwashing had tucked Bucky into some hidden corner of the Winter Soldier’s mind.

At least Steve hoped Bucky was still in there. Somewhere

“You get five minutes. Then you’ll be getting home to get some rest. I’m sure Agents Barton and Romanoff can make sure of that.” The two nod, as if they’re being given orders, but Steve has a sneaking suspicion they would have made sure of it even if Fury hadn’t suggested it. As spies, they’re as enigmatic and secretive as one would expect, but they’re also fiercely loyal. He had their backs in the past few missions, and he likes to think that he’s on their approved list.

As they get into the glass elevator, Steve feels the need to explain himself, “I hope you know that I wouldn’t have compromised the mission like that, not for normal circumstances.” That’s as close as Steve would get to apologizing for his actions. Because whatever he had done had gotten him Bucky and he would never apologize for protecting his best friend. Besides, he was the most beat up of the group at the end of the mission, so clearly he caught the brunt of his own rash decision making.

_I’m not gonna screw it up this time. Not with Bucky, but not with these people either. No one’s going to fall by the wayside because I’m too caught up in a dame or having a new body._ He’s pretty used to his body now anyways. And no more Peggy Carters are going to come around. Bucky and this team are Steve’s priorities. 

“I trust you to look out for Barton,” Natasha says, and Steve thinks it’s an even closer trust than if she had said she trusted him to watch her own back.

“And I trust you to look out for Nat, not that she needs it.” They give each other small smiles and Steve can’t help but grin, looking between the two of them. 

_Now if I can just get_ my _best friend back, I have a team that I can trust with his safety._ Just like the Howling Commandos. Except superpowered, superskilled, or, in Thor’s case, deified.

They arrive at the holding cell after a speedy ride on the elevator. Steve leaves Bucky’s clothes on a chair in the observation room outside, already missing the smell clinging to them, but completely aware that it would be creepy to take the clothes which is why the bow tie is not tucked into the pocket of his suit jacket. Except that it is and Steve can’t help but think it’ll make his apartment at least feel like half a home until Bucky—or whatever’s left of him—can fill up that space. 

If he wants to, that is.

Steve feels bad placing so many expectations on the man in that room. But he can’t help but hope. Sighing, he goes into the room; Tony is tinkering with the arm while Natasha and Clint stand by, staring at Bucky’s sleeping form. Steve can’t help but think he looks better asleep, less like a predator and more like the man he knew. But there are frown lines creasing his lips and a line between his brows as if he spent too long with them furrowed. There are scars running from where his metal arm connects to his shoulder, like the soldered joints of the pots and pans he and Bucky had cobbled together for their first apartment, outlined in angry pink. It’s as if he’s been welded to the arm, like Tony would weld something onto his Iron Man suit. Except that Bucky is made of flesh and not metal and Steve can feel his blood boiling but he can’t look away.

There aren’t any other scars on him. The serum takes care of that. But where there was once a layer of fat there is only hard, roped, knotted muscle. He remembers seeing Bucky shirtless for the first time after the POW camp and taking Bucky to the mess tent and giving him most of his extra portions, even though his stomach was rumbling at the end of the day. He remembers the gauntness of his cheeks, the stubble on his jaw. But even cleaned up as he had been for his tryst with the Senator, Bucky looks even worse than he had after Azzano.

And if that isn’t the scariest thing Steven Grant Rogers has ever thought, he’d eat his—very expensive—shoes.

_Well. There have been scarier things. Some of them even about Bucky. But none of them as important as Bucky’s wellbeing._

“I’m almost finished up here, Cap, if you want some alone time. You know, if you want to kiss your Sleeping Beauty awake,” Tony says it without any malice, and Steve chooses to ignore it, knowing that Tony’s jokes are usually a sign of his affection. Somehow, he trusts Stark with Bucky too, even if the guy doesn’t know when kidding isn’t appropriate. Like father like son. 

Steve sighs, “It should probably wait until we’re all rested and ready to deal with him. In case he’s… violent.” The word tastes bitter in his mouth. 

“I think we’re all up for another debriefing at eight anyways. After that, we’ll be here.” Steve didn’t even realize that Banner had entered the room. For a guy who can turn into a giant green rage monster, he can be quiet. But the fact that his enhanced hearing hadn’t picked up on it was more than a sign that he should hit the hay.

He gives Bucky one last look, resisting the urge to run his hands through the hair that looks just like it had in 1943, and turns back to the team he had managed to fall into, “Thank you guys. It really means a lot to have your…” Support? Help? That’s what it is, alright. But he knows they aren’t sentimental, and that he doesn’t have to find the right word. He coughs into his hand, “Thank you.”

“Aw, shucks, Steve,” Tony says as he packs up his toolkit. Natasha and Clint are giving the biggest smiles he’s ever seen light up their faces and Steve’s fairly certain it’s because they’re making fun of him but can’t bring himself to care. Banner looks like he has something to say, and he’s holding a large, flat folder that Steve hadn’t noticed.

“That’s Captain to you, Stark.”

“Regardless, _Steve,_ his arm won’t be a problem. There were multiple fail-safes, cyanide, potassium overdose, some sort of superheating device that would make the arm virtually molten. A couple more things that I won’t list because you look like you’re about to have an aneurysm. Oh, and there was something that would have given him an aneurysm. But anyways, he’s all set now.” Tony claps him on the back and Steve is torn between glaring at him and staring at Bucky. 

_Do they really need that many ways to kill him?_ Then again, Steve didn’t die easy either.

“Uh, Cap, I think you need to see his brain scans before you go.” Steve raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t object when Brue holds the translucent black plastic up to the light.

“You see that?” He points at something in the middle of the brain and Steve nods because he sees it, but that doesn’t mean he understands it, “That’s his limbic system. Amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, a few other little things. That’s our emotional center. It’s where PTSD, anxiety, depression, and a host of other disorders can develop depending on trauma.” Tony imperceptibly shifts behind them at the mention of anxiety.

“…Yeah, and?” Steve doesn’t like where this is going.

“While other parts of the mind store memory, and there’s no exact scientific laws as to how memories are developed, the MRI showed that there was very little limbic system reaction. Sort of like a dim light in his memory center.”

“You’re saying they fried his memory box.” He remembers that they had scrambled Bucky with a lobotomy, but the fact that he had healed had to mean that he couldn’t sustain that much damage. And yet the gray bit in the middle of his brain was dimmer than the rest of it. 

“I’m saying I can’t tell you exactly what they did, but it seems that he may have suffered trauma to his limbic system. That could mean anything from severe PTSD to depression, to, yes, problems with the formation of memory.”

“What about retaining memories?”

“Memories are stored throughout the cortex. I wouldn’t say there’s no chance of him remembering his life as Bucky, especially given the notes from his file. But that also means that after successive ‘memory wipes’ he might have buried that far enough that the memories he’ll recover first through therapy are those of more recent events. But, then again, it could also be exactly opposite, that he couldn’t form the memories of the past seventy years and that he’ll remember himself before he remembers anything about the Soldier.” 

Steve nods, overwhelmed by information and hope and despondence warring inside him. He wants Bucky to just remember him, to call him punk and punch his arm. He wants him to not have to live with all that the Winter Soldier did.

But apparently luck wasn’t on his side. 

“I thought you said you weren’t that kind of doctor,” Tony says quietly.

“Well, if you can become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight, I can at least give psychological neuroscience a fair shot in a few weeks.”

Steve blinks in surprise. He and Banner had discussed the psychology of the Soldier, but it was all guesswork for him, “You’ve been looking this stuff up since we got the file?”

“I was interested in helping him. He seemed like a guy who got the raw end of an already shitty deal. Besides, it was interesting, and it’s not like I’m helping people in third world countries anymore.” He sends Natasha a look, “May as well help someone if I can.”

Steve resists the urge to hug the man, instead giving him a grateful clap on the back, “Thank you, again.”

“Hopefully that helps you know what you’re in for. I’m sure the SHIELD doctors can give you a better idea tomorrow, but maybe you’ll at least be able to get some sleep tonight.” The mere mention of sleep has him yawning. Natasha and Clint are pushing him out the door at that point, and with a last look at Bucky, he lets them force him into a SHIELD car headed to his apartment, admonishing that they should go home too. 

After he pulls off the monkey suit, he sits on the bed, intending to take a shower and wipe the dried blood off his already healed face. He wakes up at 0600 with his alarm, sprawled on the covers and bleary eyed. Steve decides to go for his morning run regardless of his state of mind, knowing he would regret it if he didn’t burn off some energy. 

He heads out to the Mall after washing his face and drinking a big glass of water, vowing to actually take his shower after his run. The man already running laps around the reflecting pool makes him stop short. 

_Sam Wilson. Air Force. The guy I ran out on practically mid-sentence because I saw Bucky._ Well, Steve can’t think of any way to make bailing on a conversation because of a mission any less awkward, so he starts running.

“On your left,” He says as he passes Sam, figuring he wouldn’t be much for talking the way he was already huffing and puffing. 

Four laps for Sam—and twelve for Steve—later and Sam moves his way to the shade under a tree, where his water bottle lays. Steve finishes his lap and makes his way over to Sam.

“Need a medic?” 

“I need a new set of lungs. Dude, you just ran like 13 miles in 30 minutes.”

“Guess I got a late start,” Steve answers, just a hint of smugness in his tone.

“You’re real funny man. So, how did that mission go?”

“It was… I found someone I thought I had lost. Only I don’t know if he’s still there.”

“Man, didn’t you just defrost?” The _how did you lose someone already_ went unspoken. 

“Yeah, well, it seems like he did too.” 

“Lemme guess, top secret Captain America stuff?”

Steve chuckles, “Technically we haven’t been debriefed yet.” Sam doesn’t say anything; it’s clear he’s been coaching veterans through talking about their problems at the VA; the patience in his eyes speaks worlds. Steve can’t help but think it would help if someone knew. 

“How much you know about the Howling Commandos?”

“A little.”

“What about the sniper, Bucky Barnes, you know about him?”

“Shit. You got your right hand man back.” Sam’s voice tinges with something bitter, like regret.

Steve can’t help but laugh a little, at someone calling Bucky _his_ right hand man when he had been Bucky’s plucky sidekick his whole life, “Except that he’s a Russian assassin. And he doesn’t know that he’s...” Steve trails off, “Yeah.”

“Look,” Sam sighs into his palm, as if he’s going against all his counseling rules by giving his opinion, “I know there are a million variables, and him not knowing who he is, well, that’s a big one. But if I had my best friend back… man, I wouldn’t want to screw it up. So, you just get him to remember. And you hold onto him. Because not everyone gets that chance.”

“I will.”

Steve doesn’t get a chance to make good on that promise that day. When he finally makes it to SHIELD, ready to hurry along the debriefing so they could wake up Bucky, he’s informed of a security breach the moment he walks in the door. Worried it was the Winter Soldier, he takes the elevator to the level where Bucky’s holding cell is.

When he gets on that level, everything is clean and without damage, excepting a brutally undressed and bruised guard being lifted onto a stretcher. But there’s no Bucky. 

“Le bouclier a été compromis,” Natasha says, pushing him back into the elevator and pressing the button to take them back to exit level. Her head is angled away from the cameras. She doesn’t want them to know what she’s saying. _The shield has been compromised._

_SHIELD has been compromised._

He breathes deeply to keep himself calm, looking at the ground so that the cameras wouldn’t pick up his words, “Et mon vieil ami? Est-il dans l’immeuble?” _And my old friend? Is he in the building?_ Steve doesn’t ask if he’s compromised because he knows that if SHIELD is compromised, the day of the Winter Sodlier’s capture, it’s clear why SHIELD was infiltrated.

A few people enter the elevator, backs stiff. Natasha lowers her voice.

“Il s’est echappé après une visite de quelqu’un qui je ne connais pas. Le visiteur est ami du directeur.”

_He escaped after a visit from someone who I don’t know. The visitor is a friend of the director._ Steve doesn’t know if that means Fury is compromised, or if his friend is. He holds his tongue.

“Et les autres membres de notre groupe?” He couldn’t say the other Avengers without giving it away to English speakers, even though everyone who kept piling in the elevator probably spoke French anyways. 

“Dans un lieu sûr. Pas ici.” _In a safe place. Not here._

“Et cet ascenseur?” _And this elevator?_

“Compromis.” 

“Ouais.” The elevator stops again. The STRIKE team gets on with Rumlow, and Steve and Natasha exchange looks. Natasha nods at the goons going to the administration level; their eyes don’t react to what they’re saying about status updates. There’s sweat on the forehead of another man. They’re here to take out him and Natasha. 

Steve lets air out of his nose, hands tense by his sides, “Before we get started… does anyone want to get out?” The only response is the man in front of him activating his electrified escrima sticks and stabbing at him. Someone pushes the elevator brake and the elevator comes to a stop with a klaxon and a screech of metal. Natasha’s pushed to one side and held by Rumlow and some faceless goons, Steve to the other. They manage to put the magnetized cuffs on Natasha, while he keeps himself from getting more than one stuck to the elevator, fighting with three limbs. Natasha seems to be doing better than him with just her legs, but Steve throws his shield at her right wrist, breaking the cuff and rebounding it into the head of one of the STRIKE team holding him. While he twists to retrieve the shield, he gets zapped with Rumlow’s escrima sticks, hitting him in the back with the force of the blow and the electricity, but he doesn’t stop moving, and throws off the attack. 

Soon enough Natasha takes care of her attackers, though both her and Steve are still attached by one arm to the elevator, and soon enough, Rumlow and one other STRIKE team member are the only ones left.

“You gotta know this isn’t personal, guys,” Rumlow says before striking at Natasha with one of his sticks. Steve gets his feet up and pulls his wrist away from the metal, delivering a solid kick to the nose of the other guy, taking him down. Natasha curls into herself defensively, pulling up her knees, after Rumlow gets her in the gut with one of his escrima sticks. Of course, she still manages to kick him in the face, but Steve dispatches with him quickly by throwing him into the ceiling of the elevator.

“Sure feels personal,” Natasha says with a smirk that’s more pain than humor as she unfurls herself. Steve puts his toe on the lip of his shield, flipping it up to meet his arm before taking care of his manacle and Natasha’s remaining one. After they settle themselves in the sprawl of bodies, Natasha pushes the elevator screen. The elevator stops on a floor filled with men pointing guns at them. 

“Drop the shield and put your hands in the air!”

“Wrong floor?” Steve asks, before taking his shield through the glass and cutting the elevator cable.

“What the fuck, Rogers?” Natasha yells before he pushes at the wall and stops the elevator, “Haven’t you seen that episode of Mythbusters? Oh, right.” She rolls her eyes and gets out her pistol as Steve opens the elevator doors manually. He sees men with guns running towards them in the hallway and closes it again. 

Natasha looks down at the ceiling of the SHIELD pavilion below them, “Wanna break the glass ceiling with me?”

“You probably get paid more than me already.”

“Probably because I’m better at following orders.” Steve grabs Natasha and pulls her into his arms before breaking the glass wall of the elevator and making a run for it. He unfurls his body slightly to slow them down, but quickly gets the shield and him between the floor and Natasha, letting them fall through the ceiling to the screams of the people below. Shaking off broken glass and getting up carefully, Natasha lets out a laugh.

“Je pense que nous les avons cassés.” 

“L’ascenseur et le plafond,” Steve groans, as they pick themselves up, “Et moi.”

There are soldiers coming, their feet stamping against the concrete floor as they run towards him and Natasha, “We need to get going,” She orders, pulling him along as they run towards the parking lot, where Steve parked his bike.

He’s just glad that no one blew up his motorcycle. 

Natasha takes his helmet, and he puts on his cowl. They ride up across the bridge only to find the gates closing. Steve drives the bike up the side of the bridge, mindful that he’s riding a thin line, only to just manage to make it through the jaws of the SHIELD containment gates before they snap shut like jagged teeth. 

And that’s when they see the Quinjet with guns out and pointed towards them.

“Shit,” he mutters under his breath as he dodges the line of bullets just barely missing his bike. Part of him misses the features on the bike he took into defeat the Red Skull and wishes he had thought to put some tricks into his Harley.

When they get close enough, he yells at Natasha to take over, as he jumps on top of the Quinjet. His shield does the damage, smashing the windows and reflecting between the engines on the end. The jet starts to go down and Steve jumps off the bridge area, to find Natasha already on the road beneath. She slows down and he catches up quickly, body aching from taking so many falls in such little time. He hops on the back and they take evasive maneuvers until they arrive at some sort of safehouse. It’s mostly empty, housing a small kitchen filled with canned goods and a Murphy bed, but Natasha goes into the closet and grabs some clothing, half of which she throws at him, the other half she takes into the bathroom with her.

The hoodie and pants aren’t bad. The closet looks like it has a range of sizes and clothes of various disguising nature, from tweed to the hipster get-up he finds himself wearing. The shoes are confusing and far too bright, but he manages to lace them enough that they wouldn’t fall off his feet.

Natasha comes out in a similar outfit, down to the shoes. 

“Remember our last mission?” Steve nods. The Lemurian Star mission was one of his and Natasha’s many miscommunications. She holds up the silver USB she had gotten from that mission.

“This is why we’re a target. Fury was attacked this morning, by the Winter Soldier, after Alexander Pierce came to his holding cell.” Un ami du directeur qu’elle ne connait pas. “We didn’t even know that the Soldier was gone until Fury came to us, barely alive.” The unspoken ‘we’ is her and Clint, who share an apartment outside of SHIELD purview. Steve gets the impression that they sleep in shifts. 

“How did this go from a completely unrelated political issue to something within SHIELD?” Steve thought this was politics, not spywork. Until he got in that elevator.

“When Tony and Agent Hill ran the numbers of who in Washington had the most desire to see Stern and Amesbury and even Amesbury’s opponent out of the race, there were a lot of people. But we didn’t consider that someone inside was doing it to try to pin the entire thing on SHIELD, make America and all our allies distrustful of us.”

“What?” Steve is even more confused. Meddling in politics isn’t part of SHIELD’s modus operandi. 

“Hydra. We think they’re trying to ruin SHIELD’s reputation. Take it down.”

“How long do you think they’ve been planning this… coup?” Steve asks, rubbing a hand over his face.

“Since you were defrosted, I’d say.”

“Why?”

“Captain America took down the Red Skull, with most of Hydra. Therefore, once they grew another head, they’d have to take you down, along with the organization Peggy Carter founded to do the work that you did during the war on a grander scale.”

He sits down on a creaky chair in the corner, “The irony being that they’re using my best friend to do it.” His voice is hollow and ground up from the tightness in his throat. Natasha kneels down beside him.

“You remember when Clint was under Loki’s influence?” 

Steve nods dumbly.

“It might take some doing, but I think the Avengers can manage the same again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ouais- Yeah  
> Je pense que nous les avons casses- I think that we broke it (plural)  
> L'ascenseur, le plafond, et moi- The elevator, the ceiling, and me
> 
> Don't expect my Russian to be as good as my french because I actually speak french  
> Russian... not so much (though I am starting it in the fall!)


	3. три

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Natasha catch up with the rest of the team. The Winter Soldier gets an assignment.

“So where are we going?” Steve asks as they climb into the blue truck that Natasha hotwires. SHIELD probably has trackers in his bike, which was why Natasha insisted on parking it over a mile away and walking to the safe house.

“How much cash do you have on you?”

“Twenty,” Steve says, knowing that it’s far too little to have on him, even though he can’t really countenance carrying more than that. She shoves another twenty in his hand from a wad of cash in her back pocket. 

“We’re going to the mall. Go to the Thai place in the food court and get me a big meal with orange chicken, noodles, and whatever vegetables they have… and two water bottles. Get yourself something, and get some snack food if you have anything left over after feeding that massive metabolism of yours.” Steve’s stomach growls and he feels a little guilty knowing he needs so much.

“Okay, why?”

“I need to know what’s on this drive, but it’s going to send a signal to the bad guys, which is why Fury got hit. And we both need food if we’re going to be running into anymore bad guys.”

“Where are we going after that?” Natasha rolls her eyes at him, but answers anyways.

“Depends. I’m waiting on a call so that I can know where the safe location is. So we’re mostly killing time.” They enter the mall, walking at a leisurely pace that grates on Steve’s nerves, even though he knew it was necessary. Natasha immediately heads towards the Apple store while Steve makes his way to the food court. 

Steve’s halfway through his second slice of pizza when Natasha finds him and grabs her own food, “You started without me, honey.” Her eyes dart towards men in STRIKE team black prowling the escalator she had come from. 

“Well, I figured I needed to eat something before we get going, dear.”

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere until they move on, lover.” She takes a bite of her chicken and gives him one of her disarming smiles.

“You’ve got sauce on your face, honey, let me get that.” Before Steve can react, there’s a press of lips on his and he reminds his rapidly beating heart that this was probably a spy thing and how many times had Bucky pretended he was a dame, ducking into a dark alley and pressing close to keep him from getting the shit beat out of him. This was no different.

When they part, Steve sees the STRIKE team moving on towards the other end of the mall and thanks Natasha’s spycraft with a relieved grin.

“We should get going.” Her voice is as monotone as ever and Steve’s already packing up their lunch into the go-bags he’s glad he requested. Instead of acting like they were just leaving anyways, Natasha goes for young lovers going off to do whatever it is young people do, and Steve tries to play along, wrapping his arm around her waist. She leans up with a flirtatious grin and whispers in his ear.

“Look like you want to fuck me not like we’re going steady and you’re walking me home, Christ, Rogers.” 

Flushing pink, he moves his hand to her butt, tucking it in her back pocket, and raises an eyebrow at her that says _Good enough?_

She giggles, the noise so very un-Natasha-like, grating his nerves, and moves closer into his side when he already thought they were too close for propriety. They make it to the car with much of the same, and he sees a few older people—though none even close to his age—rolling their eyes at them. He can’t help but agree with them in his mind.

“You are a boring old man, Cap,” she admonishes as she turns on the ignition, “Most would at least put their hand up my shirt. Or pinch my ass.”

“How is that…” Steve remembers Bucky doing that to one of his dates and thinks of the way they jumped and squealed and how Bucky had bragged about them squealing in a completely different way later, and thought, _Oh, that’s probably why._

“Please don’t tell me that was the first kiss you’ve had since 1945.”

“I’m 95, not dead,” he says, even though he can only think of one of the kisses a young woman he had rescued from the Battle of New York had planted on him. And that wasn’t exactly something he asked for, so he supposed Natasha wasn’t that far off. A kiss on the cheek after a date he didn’t intend to call for a second date was the next closest contender. 

That’s when Natasha’s phone rings, and he looks to the sky in gratitude as she answers it, glad to be off the hook from her interrogation.

“Take the next exit onto 95 North,” Natasha says as she hangs up, “We’re headed to New York.”

~ 

It takes them a little under four hours. Natasha eats her food during the first leg, sighing appreciatively and saying, “This is why I came to America. Fake Thai food.” They stop at a rest stop just before Wilmington, where Steve finally finishes his pizza and grabs a Clif bar from the vending machine, devouring that too. It was a pain in the ass to be on the run having his metabolism.

Natasha takes the last two hours, after stealing them another car, leaving a note for the owners of the car. As Natasha nimbly navigates New York traffic, He half-expects them to be going to Stark Tower, but they end up heading into Queens, where they illegally park their stolen car and walk a few blocks to a quaint brick apartment building. She pushes the button for the fifth floor apartment.

“What’s the password?” Tony’s oddly comforting voice comes over the intercom.

“I’ll cut off your dick if you don’t let me in.”

“There’s the ticket.” There’s a buzz and Steve holds open the door for Natasha, who steps in with a nod of thanks.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Clint says as he lets them into the spacious apartment. He gives Natasha a hug and pats Steve on the shoulder. Bruce and Tony are in chairs next to Nick Fury, who is spread out on the couch with enough bandages to fuel a medic for a week wrapped around him. Now he knew what Natasha meant when she said ‘barely alive.’

“Sir,” he gives Fury a nod, “I’m sorry that they made him do that to you, and I know that Bucky would never have done it if he were in the driver’s seat.” The wounded man tries to sit up, but lurches back with a pained groan.

“No offense, Rogers. But fuck Bucky.”

“Duly noted.” Steve had thought the same thing plenty of times, so he wasn’t prone to argue.

“So what’s the game plan?” Natasha asks as she sits on the coffee table, cataloguing Fury’s wounds mentally. Clint leans on the divider between the kitchen and living room areas, and Steve paces through the room, noting exits and potential strategic weaknesses if they were attacked through the—heavily curtained—balcony area. 

Tony asks grumpily, “What did you get off the drive?” Clearly he’s annoyed at their inability to investigate it without alerting Hydra. 

“A location. Coordinates place it in Jersey.”

“That’s it?” Bruce had expected more.

“All that I could get at,” Natasha shakes her head. 

Steve snorts, “Well. It’s just over the river, right? And we’ve got the band together, so it wouldn’t kill us to check it out.”

“You think your boy will be there?” Clint asks him, eyes boring into Steve’s uncomfortably. He swallows and nods.

“I think it might draw him out. They have to know we have the location, since they tracked us to the mall when we checked the drive. Chances are they’d send him in.”

“So, we go. Who’s in?” Natasha asks, standing up after patting Fury’s arm with tender affection. Steve thinks to himself that the softness in Fury’s eye is fatherly when he looks at her. 

“Someone should stay in case they track us down,” Tony says, clearly not volunteering, but making a point.

“I’ll do it. I can fend off as many people as they can send, and you guys can always call in Thor if you need back up.”

“Thor, where is he?” 

“Securing Dr. Foster and other loyal SHIELD scientists in another location before reporting here,” Fury says, “Do you want us to send him your way?”

“We might need all the help we can get,” Natasha answers, remembering the sheer number of soldiers in the elevator, in the hallways, even in the mall. Hydra clearly had a foothold in the military division of SHIELD. Steve nods in agreement.

“Well, team. Let’s head out.”

~  
He wakes up in a sterile room, with the bed bolted down. The door is open and there are marks on his wrist and ankles from where manacles were, but the cuffs themselves are unlocked, lying open like skeletal jaws. Getting up, his muscles feel unused, his mind foggy with strange memories of a thin blond man with a bruise blooming next to a grin on his face. They were sharing a bed and everything was cold, in sepia tones of scratchy wool and a sweatstained, patched, and re-patched ivory shirt. He goes over the memory, the warmth of his arms around the other man filling his chest with a strange lightness, until a voice comes from the mirror in the room. A distant part of him recognizes that it must be a two-way mirror. Putting the tip of his finger to the glass and finding no space between the reflection and his hand, he knows his prediction is correct.

“Цель миссии: Ник Фьюри. Расположение: двадцатый этаж.” The voice is familiar. He’s received orders from this person already. Two senators. One dead, one mission unfulfilled. But he’s being called to a different mission. 

“Да,” he answers automatically, mind clear again. There’s a guard who he disarms easily, taking his gun and slipping on his uniform before heading to the twentieth floor, where his mission objective is.

The Winter Soldier expels the memory that plagued him and makes his way towards the elevator. Somehow, he already knows the building. The layout was probably put in his head last time they wiped him. Which was before his last mission, one which he had left unfinished. He still remembered the things he had said to get the man to go to bed with him, even the feeling of his flesh and blood hand wrapped around the guy’s dick. But someone had stopped him with the flash of a camera. 

That hadn’t been part of the mission. The mission objective was to be completed at a hotel room. But the Winter Soldier knew that his personality wasn’t going to captivate the Senator into the room. He had to give the mark some incentive. 

However strange it seemed, the man who had stopped him, who had called him the strange name, _Bucky,_ looked like the smaller man who had occupied the circle of his arms in the memory that had taunted him when he woke. But this man was larger, he wore a black and white suit, illuminated by the yellow of the street light. He had bled red and bruised as prettily as the man from his memory. They had the same eyes.

Perhaps the Winter Soldier had known him. Maybe he was a mark from another mission that they hadn’t wiped fully. It didn’t matter. He had to kill Nick Fury.

Ten minutes later, he thinks the mission is successful, and if it isn’t, medical intervention wouldn’t negate the success of the mission. The man is bleeding on the floor, prone. Referring to his last orders, he heads to that rendezvous point. His disguise is still intact, so he makes his way out of the building, leaving his weapons in the room with his mark. The Soldier doesn’t need them.

~  
“This is it?” Tony snorts, gesturing at the empty army base, Iron Man suitcase in his other hand. 

“The file came from these coordinates,” Natasha says, fiddling with a bulky locating device she was using. Steve had no doubt Tony had something better, but considering Stark Industries’ links with SHIELD, there was no way to guarantee their safety with technology not made directly by Tony.

“So did I,” Steve realizes, looking at the barracks where he had stayed, where Erskine had a drink with him—well, Steve didn’t drink it—and told Steve to stay a good man. He could only hope he had kept that promise.

Clint squints at him even though Steve is certain the man has even better vision than him, “Come again?”

“This is the camp where I was trained.”

“More like wheezed your way into Erskine’s chair,” Tony says, looking around the place. Steve expects the glow of his chest-piece, but remembers that Tony had the surgery done to take the shrapnel out of his heart last year. _Good for him._

“What made you get back in the fold? I thought you were out of superhero business?”

Tony chuckles, rubbing a hand through his hair, “I haven’t been involved in politics since I got out of the weapons industry. But I wanted Amesbury to win. More than that, she was a friend. She didn’t deserve what she got.” Steve nods in understanding.

“How does Pepper feel about that?” Natasha asks, handing Clint her device to see if he could make anything of the null readings.

“I haven’t told her… She’s safe at home. Thinks I’m checking up on Stark Tower. But I had them get rid of all the SHIELD personnel onsite anyways, just as a precaution.” 

“Maybe you should tell her,” Steve advises, looking between the barracks and a munitions center wondering how they got to be so close together.

“Why’s that, Cap? Didn’t get to tell someone something before you became a popsicle?”

“Something like that,” He looks down.

Clint hits Natasha’s device again, letting out a frustrated noise, “I haven’t had enough coffee for this.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and takes it back, “This is a dead end, guys. Zero heat signature, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Steve heads towards the building, “This building is in the wrong place. Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks.”

Tony shrugs, “Worth a shot. Knew your goody-two shoes army days would come in handy.” He claps Steve on the back, but Steve is chuckling to himself.

“What?” 

“You do realize that I made a military career of not following orders?”

“Must be why my dad liked you so much,” Tony smirks.

“Must be.”

Natasha flicks on a light switch, surprised to find there’s still enough power to illuminate the office, “This is SHIELD.”

Clint looks at the antiquated technology and snorts, “Maybe where it started.”

“Oh. Hey, dad, long time no see,” Tony quips, dusting off an old picture of his dad with a puff of air and a careless sleeve. 

“Look, Cap, it’s all your friends,” Clint says with a mirthless chuckle. Natasha is fixated with the picture of Peggy. 

“I can’t see why she wanted to name the organization after your damn shield. Should have named it after herself. Carter’s badass ladies’ club.” Steve chuckles at Nat’s commentary. Peggy would’ve liked Natasha. Steve had thought about bringing the assassin with him to his visits with Peggy once or twice, but her memory was bad enough that it was almost too painful on his own, much less with an audience.

“Well, I can’t say she shouldn’t have. She woulda liked you, back then. There was a shortage of women like her for her to talk to.” 

Natasha turns to him, “So she talked to you?” 

Steve shrugs.

“I know a little bit what it’s like to be thought less of because of something you can’t control.” His size had always made him a target; his health kept him from getting jobs that Bucky could. Peggy’s gender had made her rise in the SSR an arduous one. They both understood coming from nothing and having to fight tooth and nail for things that just fell into other people’s hands.

Clint is examining a bookshelf, one lined with titles that have nothing to do with spywork, politics, or history, “Hey, Cap, give me a hand with this!” Steve walks over, pushing the bookshelf to the side. 

The archer grins wickedly, “If you’re already working in a secret office, why do you need to hide the elevator?”

“Let’s find out then, shall we?” Steve lets everyone in the elevator before him, taking one last look at the SHIELD headquarters before letting the elevator doors close. He and Natasha exchange a look, both recalling their last time in an elevator. However, the elevator pings gently and they are able to disembark through the doors like regular folk. Tony sees the room they’re in and laughs, spinning gleefully among the old computers.

“Hey, Cap, it looks like we found all your dinosaur friends!” 

“This can’t be the data-point, this technology is ancient,” Natasha goes to one of the humungous drives that worked the screens in the middle of the room, pulling a finger through the thick layer of dust. 

“It may be ancient, but it’s still younger than Rogers.”

“Laugh it up, Clint, but you’re the one who uses a Bronze Age weapon.”

“Says the guy who uses a shield.”

“Yeah, made of vibranium,” He points out, knocking gently on the edge, which reverberates in a pure sound. 

“If you boys are done comparing old fogey weapons, I think I found the data point.” A set of modern USB ports is plugged into the main console, blue light blinking sluggishly at them. Natasha shrugs and plugs it in. 

The computer speaks, and Steve keeps himself from jumping, “Initiate system?”

“Y-E-S spells yes,” Natasha shrugs as she types in the command. 

“You could have just pressed enter,” Tony points out. Everyone else rolls their eyes.

The system whirs alive with a robotic hum, Natasha chuckles, speaking in a low voice, “Shall we play a game?” 

Tony and Clint laugh before turning to Steve to explain it. “I know. It’s from a movie. I saw it.” Tony puts up his hands defensively, before they’re interrupted by a heavily accented voice. Steve recognizes it and stares at the screen, eyes wide with dismay. 

_No._

"Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1984. Stark, Anthony. Born, 1970. Barton, Clint. Born, 1971.”

“One of these things is not like the others,” Clint sing-songs, giving Steve a look that let him know that he was that thing. But Steve is too preoccupied with the voice he never thought he’d hear again. Tony is preoccupied with the camera moving from face to face analytically. 

“It’s… some sort of recording, right?” Natasha asks, knowing it couldn’t be anything else with technology this archaic.

“I am not a recording, Fräulein. I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am.” Steve’s teeth grind as the man’s face appears on the screen.

“Who is this thing, Steve?” Tony asks, eyes more fearful than his voice lets on. 

“Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years.”

“First correction, I am Swiss. Second, look around you. I have never been more alive.” The computers whir in agreement and Steve’s heart drops into his stomach. He feels nauseous with the knowledge that he could have killed Zola when he had the chance but didn’t. 

“What did you do to Bucky in ’43?” Steve growls. 

“Nothing that wasn’t already done to you by Erskine, though not as well as he did. The rest was the Red Room before he came back into our fold.” He answers promptly, “Ah, where was I… Right, in 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body, my mind, however, that was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain.”

“More like your ego,” Clink snickers. 

“Laugh all you want, _Hawkeye_ , but I was invited into your beloved SHIELD with open arms. Where I planted the seed that resurrected Hydra.”

“Bull. Shit,” Tony counters, “Hydra died with Johann Schmidt in 1945. Move the fuck on.”

“Cut off one head, two more shall take its place. Not just a saying, young Stark. Besides, I worked with your father. Who do you think killed him and his beloved Maria?” Footage rolls across the screen and Steve feels ill. He can’t imagine how Tony feels.

“A car crash. An accident. Nothing more.” Tony’s shaking, turning away from the computer and biting his lip so hard he‘s licking blood off it not a moment later. Steve wants to comfort him, but knows that he and Stark aren’t friends on the best of days. Even Natasha looks wary.

“Not just Hydra. The Winter Soldier. I’m sure you realized that most of his murders were made to look like accidents.” Zola’s gloating.

“No.” Tony’s voice is low and dangerous.

“No? Would you like me to bring up the kill order?”

Stark rounds on the computer, voice frantic with anger, “I believe that Hydra killed them. But not Bucky Barnes. He was my dad’s friend. As much as Howard Stark talked about Captain America and wanted me to be half as good-hearted as Steve fucking Rogers, Bucky Barnes was not absent from my childhood bedtime stories, few as they were.” Tony’s voice was rising in volume, but in that moment, his voice is so quiet it sounds deadly, “You can’t just erase a good man. I do not believe in that world, I will not live in that world. And I will do my damndest to erase all that Hydra did. I will not cut off the head, but I will stab it through the heart and burn it at the fucking stake and throw a dance party to its dying screams, so don’t you dare tell me that my parents’ death was anything but an accident because you will regret it.” 

Zola starts laughing, a computerized sound that sets Steve on edge. Tony puts down his briefcase and suits up without fanfare, before promptly kicking the shit out of Zola’s ‘brain,’ starting on the databanks to their right. Steve doesn’t stop him, even though he knows they need information. It doesn’t seem to be doing much, yet.

“Hydra created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, Hydra's new world order will arise. We won, Stark, Rogers, all of you. Your death amounts to the same as your life; a zero sum.”

Clint steps up, jaw tight like a taut bowstring, “Tell us what’s on the damn drive, you Nazi scum.”

“I wrote an algorithm. For Project Insight. That is all.”

“What’s Project Insight? What algorithm?” Steve looks between Natasha and Clint, both of whom are nonplussed. Tony stops trashing the giant computer for a minute, curiosity winning out.

“The answers to your questions are fascinating. Unfortunately, you shall all be too dead to hear them.” 

The door they came through from the elevator is closing. Steve’s shield does nothing but bounce off helplessly when he tries to stop them. Tony finally stops kicking things and comes over, mask blank, “Shit.”

Natasha’s heretofore useless device beeps, “Guys, we got a bogey. Short-range ballistic. Thirty seconds, tops.” 

“Who fired it?”

Clint looks at the readout, “SHIELD.”

“I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain. You’ll have to admit, it’s better this way. We’re both of us… out of time.” 

Steve can hear the grin in Tony’s voice as they grab hands, Natasha holding onto the suit’s midsection, and Clint sighing and taking a leg, “Nope. Just you, asshat.”

Tony fires an energy blast through the two layers of ceiling and they fly through the resulting hole, Steve clutching at the suit’s hand and closing his eyes against the dirt filling the air as the missile hits Camp Lehigh, blowing everything away and sending a shockwave through him that almost makes him let go. He opens his eyes in the cold air as Tony flies higher, glad to see Clint and Natasha are still dutifully holding on. 

They land in a deserted section of Millville, the city just outside Wheaton, where he had gone to Camp Lehigh all those years ago. Tony packs up the suit, and they steal another car. Steve has the license numbers of all the cars they’ve stolen in the past day and vows to pay the owners for their trouble.

Natasha calls ahead to Fury, telling them that Thor had just arrived and was awaiting their own arrival back at the apartment.

Steve groans just thinking about the horror of sleeping arrangements.

“Whose apartment is the Queens apartment anyway?”

“An old… friend of mine has a timeshare. To be more specific, one of her aliases has a timeshare. She was SHIELD, but this is above their radar.”

“Friend is an understatement,” Natasha smirks from the front seat. Steve still doesn’t quite grasp how the person with the shortest legs got the front seat, and why Tony—the least safe driver—is behind the wheel, but he doesn’t complain.

“Well, I hope Hydra doesn’t blow up your friend’s apartment.”

“She’d just drop the alias if that happened. And take one of my nuts.” Steve looks at him askance, Clint shrugs and explains, “She likes the place.”

Tony chortles, “Sounds like my kinda woman.”

“No!” Clint and Natasha say at the same time. Steve laughs, deep in his belly, before he stops short with something between a groan and a whine, feeling a sharp pain in his gut.

“Guys… I think I got a little more shrapnel than I was looking for.” He tries to laugh but it comes out weak, stuck in his throat with a clump of what he’s fairly certain is congealed blood. He lifts his shirt and finds a wide chunk of metal lodged next to his belly button, lazily leaking crimson onto his hand.

“The question is, is the shrapnel keeping you from healing or keeping your guts from falling out,” Clint comments rhetorically, grabbing a pressure bandage from a pocket in his pants and applying it around the twisted hunk of metal, face closed off in concentration.

“I’m not gonna wait and find out. Let’s step on it, Stark,” Natasha orders as they race across the state. Tony’s speeding makes the two and a half hour journey one that lasts just under an hour. Steve doesn’t concern himself with the passage of time but with holding onto something to keep himself from passing out. There wasn’t a lot of blood loss from his abdomen, but part of him is fairly certain he’s bleeding internally. More than he can heal if they leave the shrapnel in. When Clint’s looking away, as they’re crossing the George Washington Bridge, Steve deliriously pulls out the hunk of metal, reapplying the bandage not a second later, though now his hands are covered in more blood than he’d seen in a while.

“What the fuck, Steve!” Clint grits out as he presses down on the wound, which is now energetically spilling blood into the upholstery.

“I wasn’t gonna heal with it in,” Steve defends, his voice weak and head light. As he fades in and out of consciousness he relives memories of Bucky from after the war, the far-off look Bucky would get when Steve talked to Peggy, like Bucky was trying to restrain something inside himself. The way Bucky would tell him to shut up in their tent when Steve would blather on at night, the words that once were always thrown in jest sounding sharper. He thought the war had honed the edge Bucky had always possessed, but, looking back, he thinks it was the serum, taking the dark parts of Bucky and bringing them to the surface. 

“We could put the couch cushions on the floor,” Steve smiles into the vision in front of him that is Bucky, before the war, looking polished in his suit, eyes rimmed red because Buck had loved his mom almost as much as Steve did, “I should have let you help me after Ma.”

Something touches the edges of his awareness, a female voice, “What’s he saying?”

“He’s losing too much blood.” 

“Till the end of the line, Buck,” and then he’s losing Bucky’s face to the dark and reaching after it but losing himself in the dark too. 

“We gotta get him to a doctor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Цель миссии: Ник Фьюри. Расположение: двадцатый этаж.” - Mission objective: Nick Fury. Location: Twentieth floor.
> 
> Da is yes.  
> (Much google translate was used. I will correct this after I take my Russian class.)
> 
> As you can probably tell, each chapter is going to be the chapter number in a different language, hopefully one being used in the text if I can manage it. According to the Marvel Comics database, Steve speaks/understands an impressive number of languages, and I'm excited to explore that aspect of him.


	4. Quattro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team puts their injured member back together. The Winter Soldier pays a visit.

The rendezvous point was not as it had been before the mission. No lab to make the mission go away, no people in lab coats to put him on ice after wiping him, just a graying man in a three-piece suit. His voice was the same from the mirror; the Soldier recognizes it from his mission before that too. He could see that his handlers were getting sloppy, and a fighting spirit deep inside him wanted to take advantage of that. But instead he takes the assignment docilely, body stiff with repressed violence. His body was made to kill and the urge to do so came with the territory. The aching inside his chest, where his metal arm met his shoulder, eased only when he was in a mission, doing what he was created to do.

_You’ve shaped a century. I need you to do it again._

“Two targets. Level six. They come with accessories, though. The Avengers. I suppose you don’t know who they are. Either way, I don’t have a location for you. But I’m sure you know very well how to find them. I’ll give you extended time to locate them. Take this tracker; the one in your arm was disabled. Rendezvous at SHIELD headquarters in Washington, DC.” The man slides him a dossier. 

If he hadn’t had the instinct trained out of him, the first target’s face would have made his breath intake, his heart rate change. Between killing his last target, stealing nondescript clothing, and finding the rendezvous point, the Soldier had been pummeled by images of the man, both in tones of ivory in the filtered light of a shoebox apartment and the muddied red, white, and blue of the uniform he was wearing in the picture in the dark olive lamplight of an army regulation tent. And now he had a name to go with the face. Steve Rogers, codename: Captain America.

Something about the codename makes a fierce anger bloom in his chest, something that tore at his throat and tainted the memories of the skinnier version of the man he was now set to kill. Uncertainty rises within him. He could be making up these memories to comfort himself. He might be weak of mind. 

_Or I could be remembering a life before they made me into what I am._

Disregarding the unsettling thoughts, the Soldier knew he needed information. A crowded building with rich architecture that he had passed on the way to the rendezvous had proudly sported banners advertising their Captain America exhibit. He backtracks there and sneaks in, glad to have a hoodie and baseball cap to mask his face once he sees the etched glass wall sporting a carbon copy of it. Even the hair is similar, since they cut it for the mission after his last defrost. Part of him misses the simplicity of being wiped after every mission, how clean it felt. The other part of him, the one reading the wall about James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes, remembers what the man—Steve—had called him.

_Bucky._

The man’s voice had sounded warm and rich, like coming home. Something he wasn’t familiar with, but knew tangentially from the memories of that apartment, faded couch cushions on the creaky hardwood floors, legs tangled as his chest heaved from—not exertion, or a punch to the gut, but—laughter. Home smelled of day-old smoke from asthma cigarettes and sounded like Steve coughing up a lung and tasted like regret. Because the Winter Soldier wasn’t that man, as much as he had the memories, knew that he was the one who rubbed Stevie’s back until his chest stopped hurting and who had wanted to kiss it all better and ghosted his lips over Steve’s forehead in a silent prayer when he finally managed to sleep in the winter cold.

He reads every bit of information on the walls voraciously. He learns the names of the other Howling Commandos, what unit the person who he must have been was in, and how he had died on Zola’s train in the Alps. The only unanswered question left is how he had survived. 

The Soldier grabs the tracker inside his pocket, knowing that the man—Alexander Pierce, the name came to him—must know where he was. Transferring it to his left pocket, he crushes it between his metal fingers like a grape. 

Making his way out of the museum, the Soldier turns the information over in his mind before heading to the bus station, determined to catch a ride to Brooklyn. Even if Captain America and the Black Widow aren’t there, he might learn something about this Bucky Barnes.

~  
“What the hell happened?” Bruce shouts as he grabs a SHIELD-issue heavy duty medical kit, Thor clearing the table with a swipe of his arm so that Clint and Tony can put the big guy down. Natasha is parking the car away from the apartment to avert suspicion, though she would have rather been with Steve, given the strained set of her shoulders as she drove away.

“Shrapnel in the gut. He kept it in until we got to the George Washington Bridge, then started bleeding something fierce after the idiot yanked it out,” Tony reports, holding down the soaked bandage on the man’s stomach, feeling liquid splutter between his fingers.

“And how did he get fucking shrapnel?” Fury yells from the couch, still too weak to stand up, but not so damaged he can’t scold them.

“We were near an entire abandoned military base exploding. It isn’t uncommon to encounter flying hunks of metal. The rest of us are fine, thanks for asking,” Tony snaps back, still applying pressure to no avail.

Clint and Tony switch as Clint puts on a new pressure bandage, and the look Tony gets at the wound is enough to make him nauseous, but at least there aren’t any guts.

“Does the Son of Rogers need a doctor?” Thor steps out from the shadows, having arrived after the four Avengers were already on their way back from Camp Lehigh. 

“I got this,” Bruce says, hands red from as thorough a washing he could get in the kitchen sink, as he shoves a tray with a cauterizer, clamps, more gauze, and materials to do stitches into Tony’s hands. Clint briefly hopes that they make it to the stitches before Cap bleeds out. 

“I thought you weren’t that kind of doctor!” 

“I’ve been giving medical care in underdeveloped nations for the past four years. Don’t give me that shit today, Tony.” He tells Clint to wash his hands with scalding water and he does so, coming back to find half the wound stuffed with gauze—already soaked with blood—and the other half open to the hiss and burn of the cauterizer.

“Get me fresh gauze on that half, Barton.” He does as he’s told, hands steady as they would be if he were drawing back an arrow. Tony’s hands are shaking the tray of tools, the constant clinking of metal on metal making Clint clench his jaw.

“Okay. That’s cauterized. We just need to do the other side. The shrapnel missed major organs, but nicked—well, completely cut open—a few veins. Cap’s superhealing should take care of replenishing the blood he’s lost and repairing the damage, it just couldn’t keep up with the constant blood loss. He must have passed out from the shock—he didn’t lose nearly enough that the blood loss would have made him pass out; he should wake up fairly soon.”

Clint pulls away the gauze and moves to the other side of the table to give Banner room to maneuver the cauterizer, “So, do we get to yell at him about taking out the shrapnel when he wakes up?”

“No yelling. But, yes. What he did was stupid and reckless and he should know that.”

Tony snorts, “I’m just glad he did it when we were almost here, or he probably wouldn’t have made it.” The tray’s shaking isn’t as prominent; Stark’s breathing is steady. Bruce is just grabbing the thin, flexible needle to close the wound with delicate stitches when Natasha runs back in, face flushed from exertion.

“How is he?”

“He should be fine,” Bruce assures her; Clint starts wiping away some of the blood drying on Steve’s stomach and the table around Banner’s deft hands. Stark’s wearing a small smile of relief, and Thor is grinning as well. 

Natasha sinks down at the table by Cap’s head and strokes his hair away from his face. His forehead is a regular temperature, and, checking his pulse, it seems fairly regular, if a little weak. She curses fondly at him, “Балван.”

Clint chuckles, along with Thor and his allspeak, knowing what she had called him. _Thick-headed fool._

Of course, Natasha’s all smiles—well, as close as she gets to a smile—until her eyes land on Fury across the room, “Project Insight,” She says darkly, all fondness evaporated from her voice as she gets up.

Fury’s voice sounds tired, “What about it?” 

“Zola was alive in that military base—kept alive in computers. He was the data point. This flashdrive has an algorithm on it. One that he wrote for Project Insight.” Natasha’s eyebrow is raised, a challenge.

“Three next generation helicarriers synced to a network of targeting satellites.”

“What are the satellites targeting?”

“Threats.”

“You mean people,” Banner accuses quietly from where he’s washing his hands. Tony’s next to him, washing the tools, and he doesn’t look any happier with the prospect.

“You asked me to consult on the turbines. You didn’t tell me it was a weapon.”

“YOU are a weapon, Stark. You and your suits. And you can use it for good. Why can’t SHIELD?”

“Because Hydra is inside SHIELD and I’m not so sure they’re any different anymore.”

“Look, the new long range precision guns can eliminate a thousand hostiles a minute. The satellites can read a terrorist's DNA before he steps outside his spider hole. We can neutralize threats before they even happen.” Fury’s still defending it as if mass murder is a good idea. Stark’s fists are clenched.

“I hate to sound like Cap,” Clint says, “But shouldn’t the punishment usually fit the crime?”

“We can’t afford to wait that long.”

“Is that not why we are here? To stop those that commit crimes against this world?” Thor asks, eyes narrowed suspiciously at the man lying on the couch. 

“How about you get Cap to a bed, and when he wakes up we can talk ethics. It’s late.” Natasha purses her lips, but backs down anyways. Thor and Clint take Steve to the nearest bedroom, with Natasha supporting his middle so that his stitches don’t tear in transport. She tucks him in gently; Clint puts a hand on her shoulder and they leave, closing the door behind them.

After cleaning up the mess, the team heads off to divvy up the other bedrooms, Clint and Natasha speaking in hushed tones before heading their separate ways. 

~  
The Winter Soldier likes thinking of himself as Bucky. It makes him feel more human, stand straighter as he walks the streets of Brooklyn. He doesn’t recognize anything, in fact he doesn’t expect to. What few memories he has, they take place inside bars and apartments, or in alleys of buildings long gone, or a continent away. 

As he continues walking, the sense of familiarity dims. A park sign says he’s in Queens, and the sound of feet on the ground make him stiffen in anticipation. Someone’s running, sprinting across the t-intersection and past his view. But a flash of dark red hair and the light-footedness of the woman tell him that it’s either an impressive civilian or his target.

_Natasha Romanoff._

But instead of pulling out his knife and engaging, he trails behind her at a sedate distance, eyes sharp even in the poorly lit street. If she hadn’t been so panicked, the Winter Soldier—no, Bucky, _I have a name now_ —thinks that she would have spotted his tail. However, as she runs four blocks and races into an apartment building, Bucky’s sure she didn’t catch on. 

He swings up into a nearby tree and listens, enhanced hearing picking up nearly half of the conversation. Noting which room lights up when they put ‘Cap’—a nickname he saw in the Howling Commandos informational at the Smithsonian—to bed, Bucky prepares himself for a long wait. He’s clearly injured and a deeply buried part of him is angry as he has to wait to be by the man’s side. But all the lights are off within an hour. Two hours after that, he makes his move, crawling from the tree to the window of the room he knows houses Steve Rogers.

~  
Steve jolts awake, body feeling contorted by nausea and a sense of displacement. Even though he’s tired and his entire body aches, especially his midsection, he knows there’s someone there, in the room with him. He twists, trying to see anything with his eyes unadjusted to the lack of light, but feels a sharp pain and stops doing the offending motion, lying back with a grimace. Feeling the tender area on his stomach, he discovers a bandage and the small line of hard plastic pinpricks underneath that signify stitches. 

“Hello?” He asks the darkness, feeling lost without his shield and hoping Natasha had stayed with him to make sure he didn’t bleed out in his sleep—or state of unconsciousness. The presence is distinctly unlike anyone on the team but Natasha. And then he places the scent in the room. _Home_ Smoke and cheap whiskey and something that was distinctly:

“Bucky?”

“I think… that I’m him.” The voice answers uncertainly, accent a hybrid between Bucky’s Brooklyn drawl and unaccented English. He had half-expected Russian, so he found himself mildly pleased. 

“James Buchanan Barnes?” Steve ventures cautiously as Bucky approaches him.

“107th. Howling Commandos sniper. Steve Rogers’… his something.”

“Best pal?”

“I don’t think it was just that.” The bed shifts as Bucky sits down gingerly. Steve wants to reach out, to embrace the man in front of him, whose tired face is revealed to him in the dim light from the window. 

“What do you think you are then?” Steve whispers, carefully extending a hand towards his shoulder, mindful of his own injury and Bucky’s potentially volatile reaction. 

“Something more. At least to him… To me.”

“To Bucky?” The figure nods sharply and Steve can’t help but take in a quick breath as the hand he put forward was pulled into another warm, calloused hand. 

Before he can formulate a response there’s more warmth, all over, as Bucky turns into Steve’s body, hands leaving his to frame Steve’s face, one hand cold metal, but gentle, the other rough and inviting with the heat of flesh and blood. Bucky’s thumb runs over Steve’s lip and he lets out a barely concealed shiver.

“I have all these memories, not of any of the people Bucky knew, none of the Commandos, no one from the 107th, not even his parents or sisters, but of you. Why? Why you?” Bucky’s legs are folded in the middle of his and Steve can’t help but think of all the times Bucky had cleaned Steve up like this and Steve had to grit his teeth, not just because of the rubbing alcohol on his wounds, but because of the urge to wrap himself around Bucky and never let go.

“We… we were close.” He gulps past a sense of panic that feels more like anticipation. 

“How close?” Bucky’s nose brushes against his, and Steve wants to whimper in his grip as he feels the words ghost across his skin, even as his own hands are reaching to clasp around the back of Bucky’s neck, fisting in his collar to keep himself grounded. 

He puts his forehead to Bucky’s, fingers curling in the dark shorthairs at the back of his neck. There’s a low heat building in his belly and he thinks dimly to himself that this is the closest he’s felt to another person since defrosting. And then there’s the softness of lips grazing his, a rough hand scraping his scalp and tugging at his hair and a wet heat as Bucky’s mouth opens under his and Steve’s eyes are closed, emotion stinging behind them and narrowing in his throat, and he wants to cry because this is all he’s ever wanted, this press of lips and gentle tug of teeth and Bucky tugging him closer and the warmth in his stomach tightening into a knot as his fingers dig into Bucky’s back and his hand skates over the taut metal of Bucky’s arm and—

Then it’s gone. The window’s open and Steve’s never felt emptier. 

He puts his head in his hands and breathes heavily, trying not to let out a sob. 

“Steve?” Natasha’s voice is soft with something like sleep and at least she’s knocking. He coughs, pressing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, and hikes up the blanket, making sure he’s covered. 

“Yeah.” She comes in without further prompting, flicking on a lamp before sitting on the end of the bed.

“Who were you talking to?”

Steve splutters, “Mysel…f.” Natasha’s eyebrows are already raised incredulously. He sighs and looks down at his knees, knowing better than to lie to the spy.

“I spotted him following me when I got to the apartment. But he didn’t… He wasn’t stalking me like prey. He was just tailing me, like he was using me to get to someone else.” Her eyes flicker over to him and Steve feels like he’s under the microscope.

Part of him rejects that she would just let Bucky follow her when Steve was injured, “So you didn’t say anything? What if he had wanted to kill me?”

She’s rolling her eyes at him, “Clint’s been on the rooftop over all night, EMP arrow at the ready. I was right outside the door.”

“So he saw…” Steve swallows and coughs again, “And you heard?” 

Her response is her usual bland expression, tinged with a compassion Steve was glad for, “I didn’t know you had lost a lover.”

His voice is rough and his smile is forced, “I didn’t know I had either.”

“Oh.” Her cadence contains a note of surprise.

“Yeah.”

Natasha bites her lip, not coy, but contemplative, “Clint’s trailing him now. I can grab Tony and we can take him in or…”

“Or what?” Steve didn’t expect an option.

“Or we can wait for him to come back in for a taste of Capsicle,” Stark says from the entryway, making an obscene gesture and grinning in the yellow lamplight. Steve gives him an exasperated look that says exactly where Tony can shove his attitude.

“Please, you think I sleep while my roomy’s getting Hydra assassin tail? Not a chance, Rogers.” 

“Can we just stop talking about this?” 

Of course, that’s when Bruce and Thor come in from the hallway, looking like they’ve been awake for the entire exchange.

“Love between warriors is not an uncommon or shameful occurrence, son of Rogers. This man is a warrior of some stature and you should be proud to have him by your side.” 

“Did you pop your stitches?” Bruce asks, the closest he can get to an innuendo before snickering with Tony.

“Tell Clint to come back and get some sleep. If Bucky wants to talk to me, he’ll come.”

“You bet he will,” Tony says under his breath as he files out with everyone else. 

Natasha stops in the doorway, “You know they’re just giving you shit because they care, right?” Steve’s face is still burning a little red from the commentary, but he nods. 

“It’s just… whatever that was… it’s brand new and I’m still processing. Not sure the snark was necessarily the best helper.” She gives him an unreadable look.

“Didn’t seem new to me.”

“The closeness isn’t new. The closeness of certain… lips. That’s new. For us. I mean. We’ve both kissed. Just, you know, not each other,” And he’s burning red again, not because he’s embarrassed to have kissed Bucky, but because he can barely defend himself without getting flustered because he’s just _thinking_ about it and he’s warm all over.

“Sleep well, Steve. Oh. And don’t you fucking dare go pulling shrapnel out of a wound again. _Imbécile._ ” 

Steve chuckles, “Malgré cela, tu m’aimes.”

She inclines her head with a half-smile, before closing the door on her last words, “Bien sûr.”

Inevitably, Steve can’t sleep, unable to even toss and turn for fear of disturbing his stitches. Looking back on it, taking out the shrapnel had probably been a dumb move. Sometimes Steve was well aware of the limits and means of his body, and, other times, he needed other people to tell him he was being stupid. In a medical sense, those people had been either Morita or, now, Bruce Banner. In a general sense, Bucky and Natasha were probably the co-heads of the telling-Steve-he’s-being-an-idiot club. 

His mind still can’t wrap around the events of just the last hour; he doesn’t even try to fathom the long day he’s had. But he can’t help but replay the feeling Bucky’s lips against his, the tight warmth that had burrowed in his gut and reared its head again when he thought of all the times Bucky had licked his lips and Steve had followed the motion with his eyes, but now he knew what that tasted like and it was torture. He stretches out his legs on the bed and tries to ignore the fire crawling beneath his skin. Resisting the urge to palm his half-hard member, instead forcing his hands behind his head and counting backwards from three hundred until he feels his eyes sliding shut.

~  
After a mile the archer stops following him, clearly called off of him by Steve or one of his teammates. Bucky slows, seeing a dark, familiar structure looming in the distance. He walks more miles than he meant to in heading towards it, but recognizes it almost immediately after he finds it. 

He recognizes the underlying structure of the building that had housed the 1943 World’s Expo, and the neighborhood around it is somewhere he recalls vaguely, the déjà vu itching in the back of his mind. There are more towers, and a great circular pavilion, but the t-shaped building next to it haunts his memory, as the last place he had seen Steve before heading off to Europe. He remembers Steve making another last-ditch attempt at the enlistment center, and Bucky resigning himself to Steve preferring that to another horrendous double-date. 

_I shoulda talked him out of it. Spent my last night with him instead of walking those girls home. Maybe I woulda died in a POW camp, but at least I woulda died honest._

The thought comes unbidden to him. He had never thought like Bucky before, never felt a reprieve from the cold of his mind. The Winter Soldier isn’t—Bucky—isn’t sure if it’s good or not. But he agrees with Bucky: he should have kissed Steve a hell of a lot earlier because that was something. The Winter Soldier had been used on sex ops by the Red Room, by Pierce, even if he hadn’t finished that mission. Nothing the Soldier had done came close to what the part of him that was Bucky could be with Steve. Maybe love or long-held affection was what made the sensations so intoxicating. He didn’t know. It wasn’t part of his programming.

He heads for the building, breaking the padlock on the door with a clench of his metal fist. The interior doesn’t inspire anything much, except where there was a staged area. He remembers an almost-flying car, some red hot rod, and a man joking about it, saying they’d have them in a few years. 

Nausea churns in his stomach when he remembers that the man from the Smithsonian and the man from the World’s Expo are the same one—Howard Stark of Stark Industries. The Winter Soldier doesn’t remember killing him. But he’s on the list that’s archived in a dark corner of his mind. Along with a Maria Stark. 

_Car accident. But not an accident._

Finding a secluded nook that wouldn’t be searched by the police if they did a sweep—too filthy and too small a space—he curls into a ball and tries to sleep. Trying being the operative word. The Winter Soldier knows how to turn himself on and off like a light, but Bucky and whoever else is in his head want him to go back to the warm apartment in Queens and tuck himself around Steve like he did back before the war. Except he wouldn’t have to pull his pelvis away to keep himself from snuggling a morning wood into his friend’s backside. He could kiss Steve’s neck and make him sigh and trace Cyrillic into the planes of his back. 

The warmth that was stretching down into his chest stops, curling up like a dead blossom in the cold. _That’s why I can’t go back. I’m still the Winter Soldier. I’m still Russian, even if I remember being American._ Not to mention the fact that he’s on orders to kill him and his friends. The problem being that the programming is breaking down. And he doesn’t know if or when it will snap back into place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Imbecile- Idiot  
> Malgre cela, tu m'aimes- despite that, you love me  
> Bien sur- Of course
> 
> Couldn't manage to fit in another language, but there was kissing, so Italian is an appropriate romance language.


	5. Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team stays in the Queens apartment for another day-so that Steve can 'heal.'

Steve’s body aches as he awakens far too early to the sounds of an argument in the nearby kitchen. While part of him wants to go and play peacemaker, the rest of him forcibly reminds him to get to the bathroom, and fast. While washing his hands, he catches his reflection in the mirror. He needs a shower, and new clothes. But he doesn’t know where to find the latter of those in the Queens apartment, and the voices are rising through the walls, heading to a fever pitch that Steve can’t in good conscious ignore.

“And what exactly did you fucking think letting the man who tried to fucking kill me into our goddamn fucking safehouse would fucking accomplish?” He can hear Fury’s accusing tone even through the closed bathroom door. Steve splashes water on his face, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes before shaking the water off his hands and leaving to face the music. His only hope is that Fury doesn’t know what Steve had done with the man who had tried to kill him.

Natasha snaps back in rapid-fire Russian, “ _Maybe give Steve some goddamn peace of mind._ ”

“You do realize that I can speak Russian, Да?” 

“You do realize that you should be sleeping in, right?” Bruce quips from where he’s making—heavenly smelling—eggs and bacon with Clint barely helping and Tony pretending to help.

Steve sighs, “I probably would be, if it weren’t for the arguing. But I’m in a lot less pain, so I’m willing to bet I’m almost healed.” Back in the war, they’d dug bullets out of him and he’d been back in the field within a day or so. 

“Healed or not, you need some sleep, Cap,” Natasha admonishes, handing him a full plate of eggs and bacon and gently pushing him towards the small kitchen table, which is dressed with a tablecloth, as Natasha realized in the morning that they hadn’t quite gotten all the blood out of the wood grain. Steve was oblivious to this, however, as he dug into the food, more ravenous than he had known he was. Healing took a lot out of him, and his body needed food to keep up with that.

The next few servings of food come out of the kitchen, leaving him, Natasha, and Thor the only ones eating. Steve suspects that Fury, Tony, and Clint have already eaten, given the way they’re awake enough to suck down their coffee, “After you eat, we’ll take a look and see if the stitches need out yet, but you’ll probably need them in another day or so.” Bruce grabs his own serving in one hand and turns off the stove, joining them at the table with a mug of tea in his other hand. 

“Well, we may not have a day or so if Rogers’ kept boy brought a tracker with him,” Fury comments from the couch.

“I scanned for outgoing signals while they were necking. Don’t worry.”

Fury’s eye widens and Steve hides the redness in his face by scarfing down food, even though he feels the flush crawling up the back of his neck.

_Goddamn Stark._

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Regardless, after Rogers is healed we are leaving this apartment. It’s too much of a security risk to have the Winter Soldier on our position.” Steve opens his mouth to argue, but Natasha meets his eyes and shakes her head sharply. He closes his mouth. 

“Fine. But where will we go?” Clint points out, about to clamber off the counter to refill his coffee. 

“Tactically, we should be in DC. Take the offensive,” Natasha agrees before applying herself to her orange juice.

“But who can we trust that Hydra doesn’t already know we know?” Tony asks, halting Barton with a hand in the air and pouring his coffee for him. They all look around the room, waiting for someone else to speak. In that moment, Steve remembers just how slowly they all make friends. 

“I know someone. Not sure if he can handle all of us, but he might be able to help.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows, mouth still preoccupied with her orange juice. 

“You have friends?” Clint asks for her. Steve glares at Natasha, knowing that the question was a hybrid of her and Clint’s barbed wit. 

“How do you know he isn’t Hydra?” 

“He works for the VA. Counseling vets. Not exactly something an operative could pull off.” Natasha and Clint purse their lips in acknowledgement. Being a veteran isn’t something easily replicated, even with the shit most spies see in their time.

Much as he had seen operatives try to replicate it, their stature, even their ‘invisible wounds’ give a different vibe than those of a vet. There’s a certain kinship there, even between branches of the military and over seventy years. That’s why Sam had been able to distinguish Steve as a vet even though he was out of uniform. 

“If the Captain trusts this man, then so do I,” Thor declares. While Thor may not understand the full range of human social constructs, he could tell that Steve was being ganged up on, and strove to get him out of the corner and fighting on even ground. That was something it seems few people acknowledge about Thor—his utter kindness, regardless of anything, in the face of strange people and strange customs. And the fact that he is actually quite smart, much as he plays the fool. But, as for his kindness, Steve is grateful for it in this moment.

“As long as it isn’t another sniper-assassin-ex-boyfriend-from-seventy-years-ago, we should be all set.”

“We’ll be even better if we get you a muzzle,” Steve complains around his last bit of egg. 

Tony starts to say something, but Bruce cuts him off, “We should have a look at your injury.” He takes Steve’s plate along with his own and puts them in the sink before leading Steve into the room that had been designated as his sometime when Steve was unconscious.

“Thanks for the rescue, Doc,” Steve grimaces as the gauze and tape come off under Bruce’s gentle hands. 

“Not a problem. Tony’s just enthusiastic about finally having something to use against you.”

 _Or something to use against the ghost of his father. Howard wasn’t exactly a fan of queers, at least when we knew him._ But then again, was he one? Steve had never felt like he wanted men. Not before Bucky. Though, he hadn’t exactly wanted a lot of women until Peggy, either. And Natasha trying to set him up on dates had made him even more wary about the attentions of people who didn’t know and care for him before he was made into some sort of Adonis by the serum. 

He half-chuckled thinking about the criteria he had given Natasha for finding him a date: shared life experience. Something he and the Winter Soldier and whatever part of him that was Bucky had in spades. Steve supposed it only made sense that the first person he found himself attracted to in the twenty-first century was a ghost from the past. 

“Seems like everyone here doesn’t quite understand a private life.” Bruce nods calmly, reminding him of Sam’s relaxed counseling techniques.

“Well, it looks like we should take the stitches out tonight, then have you sleep without them to make sure everything’s healed internally.” Steve could already see the pucker of scar tissue around the stitches, and any pain he had was limited to the itch of healing. He shot Bruce a grateful look. Banner was giving him a chance for a private moment with Bucky by prescribing another night in Queens. 

“Oh, we packed some extra clothes for you. If you wanted to get cleaned up.” Bruce points at a small duffle tucked in the corner. There’s still blood soaked into Steve’s jeans and he feels more than a little grimy. He’d gone longer without a shower on missions with the Howling Commandos; hell, he’d gone longer without getting clean during most winters before the war. But he’d lived in a world where he could get a shower every day with ease for three years, and his standards of cleanliness were a lot higher now. 

He’s about to grab the duffle when Bruce turns around in the doorway, “I forgot to ask. What did he remember first?” Steve recalls their conversation after they captured the Winter Soldier, the brain scans and Banner’s uncertainty as to what he would remember.

“Bucky said he just remembered… me.” Bruce gives him a small smile that speaks depths of the romantic in him. 

“Were you together before the war?” Steve shakes his head.

“Wasn’t really a possibility.” Even if it wasn’t against the law, Steve could barely get up the stairs without breathing heavily. Hell, before the serum he had never even seen Bucky in true all-color vision, or heard his voice in his bad ear. While he could work sometimes, drawing pictures for pennies on the richer side of town or clerking for a nearby business—within easy walking distance, or his flat feet would add to his constant list of aches and pains—he was ill most of his life, often knocked up with pain from his ulcers, and his joints ached almost as painfully as the aspirin made his stomach feel after he got rheumatic fever. While he had eventually moved in with Bucky after his mother died, that was mostly because he almost died on his own and Buck used the ‘Sarah Rogers didn’t nurse you back to health every winter, after scarlet fever and three bouts of pneumonia and buy you raw liver ‘til ’28 to let you die on your own.’ And that had been that. He was an invalid. It wasn’t only not conducive to romance, it made it almost physically impossible.

Banner pauses for a moment, “You know about the death camps, right?” Steve nods grimly, remembering his anger after finding out about them—Hydra worked within them, but his main targets were Hydra bases. If he had just found a map of those he could have stopped some of the horror going on there. But he was too preoccupied with revenge for the 107th, for Bucky, that he didn’t stop to recall the smaller dots on the map.

“The gay men that were in the concentration camps—they wore pink triangles—they were arrested _after_ being tortured and starved and whatever else in those camps, forced to two years in prison under paragraph 175. And then when the German government started paying reparations to victims from the camps, they supposedly didn’t qualify for compensation.” Steve’s jaw clenches, his typical reaction to the horrors of history that he couldn’t stop all because he wanted so badly to die and, well, he didn’t think about anyone else but himself in the process of taking a nose-dive, “I read that a few weeks ago; it just reminded me of what a different time you come from.” Bruce shrugs, having delivered the information in his typical unbiased manner before wandering out of the room. 

Steve’s mind lingered on what Bruce had said while he showered. If Steve had just found a place to land the damn plane—Howard and Peggy could have found him one, he was sure of it, but he didn’t want a place to land it. He wanted oblivion. He wanted to die with the Red Skull, die with his mission. Die having avenged Bucky, ready to see him in heaven, hell, or just unwilling to live in a world without him. At that point, Steve hadn’t cared what was on the other side as long as Bucky was there. Tears prickle at the back of his eyes and he turns his face towards the warm spray. It was selfish, but he was glad that he had missed helping all those people. Because Bucky was alive and here now. And so was he.

 _But I could have gone back for the body. I could have found him before Hydra and the Red Room._ Steve knows the train of thought is pointless. There were a lot of things he could have done other than killing himself via needless self-sacrifice. He knows better than to call it anything it wasn’t, because he wanted to die and that wasn’t something you can just snap out of or get over. That’s something you live with every day and try not to think about the cold water rushing into your lungs or the calm after you finally let yourself breathe in the water and drift away.

The truth was, Steve didn’t even know how he managed three years without trying again. He took it a day at a time, kept himself busy enough to kill the thoughts before they started. After a year, he was able to start doing missions for SHIELD. Of course, jumping without a parachute didn’t do much to him, nor did taking unnecessary risks to his safety. 

His friends all being dead or senile was only a part of the curse, the nature of the serum preventing him from joining them. That was the real curse. 

He leans against the tiles and breathes heavily, swallowing past the tightness in his throat. Because part of him is so selfishly happy that Bucky is alive, despite the awful things that were done to Buck; now Steve can stop thinking about how much easier it would be if he just died on a mission. Now, no matter how hard it is, Steve finally has something to work towards. And that’s all he needs. 

Shaking off the melancholy, Steve runs the shower cold for a minute, relishing the small pinpricks of pain that come with it before turning it off. He’s relieved to find khakis and a gray Henley in the bag, along with shoes much more sensible than the bright and difficult-to-lace sneakers he was forced to wear under Natasha’s guidance.

Putting the clothes on, he feels more human than he had since they had brought in the Winter Soldier. _Was it really less than thirty six hours ago?_

The file said it had taken the Soldier seventy-two hours to begin remembering. _So why does Bucky already remember me? Why is he already disobeying?_ Steve can’t help but hope that he’s the reason. Because that means that Bucky will come back tonight, curious about his memories, about Steve.

~

The Soldier wakes up with a feeling of disorientation, part of his body in free-fall and the other planted solidly in a nook of the Ford pavilion where the 1943 World’s Expo was held. 

The Soldier remembers every detail of the Bucky Barnes biography at the Smithsonian, how he fell to his death. _Bucky_ remembers the slide of his cold fingers from Steve’s warm ones and the pain on his best buddy’s face and the freedom of letting go. The freedom of knowing he wouldn’t taint Steve anymore. That Steve would go on, marry Peggy, and forget about him.

And the black filling his vision as he hit bottom. 

He shudders and makes his way quickly out of the building, disliking the memories the abandoned stages and booths bring back. Bucky’s warmth and desire wars with the cold chaos of the Winter Soldier, confusing his normally calm mind. He knows he doesn’t want to kill Steve or his friends. He doesn’t want to kill anyone except Alexander Pierce and whoever else his last handlers were. 

_Not until I figure out who I am,_ he vows. 

Regardless, he’s here on a mission, and his body reminds him of that. His shoulder where his metal arm meets his body aches until he sets up a position on the roof of the building over from the apartment where Steve is, at which point the throbbing subsides to the dullness of static. The curtains are all drawn again; he suspects the ones in Steve’s room were only open earlier to provide the archer with a vantage point on the Winter Soldier. He smells tuna and surmises that someone’s making lunch. 

He must have slept longer than intended in the darkness of the Expo building, given that information, and is thankful that their group hasn’t moved on already, or else he would have had to make the effort to track them.

Vowing to himself not to sleep that long again lest he lose them, he stays on the roof despite bodily fatigue, the spring sun warming his back. A few hours and a few cat naps later he smells spices and hears the commotion of plates clacking and boisterous conversation. It’s darker now, the sun setting in a rosy burst of color against the skyline of brick and glass.

An hour or so after that, Steve’s room is light again, thin curtains opened to reveal one of his friends—his mind supplies the name, Dr. Bruce Banner—methodically removing stitches from Steve’s stomach. Bucky wants to know what happened, punch Steve in the arm for being stupid: because undoubtedly he did something stupid to need that many stitches. The Winter Soldier represses Bucky’s urges, tempering him and forcing him to wait until the other lights go out before making his way to Steve’s window, again using the tree to get himself there. 

“You gonna come in, or should I come out?” Steve asks from where he leans out the window nonchalantly, hand on his chin. It said something about his state of mind that the Soldier was so focused on climbing that he didn’t hear Steve shuffling towards the window. 

Bucky doesn’t speak, still caught in the stealth and silence of the Winter Soldier, trying to transition back to making noise, “You hurt?” His voice is rough with disuse and he coughs.

“All healed up.” 

Instead of responding he backs up on the branch and gestures for Steve to join him, a challenge in his eyes. A dim part of him remembers that Steve never backed down from a dare and is curious to see if this new Steve is any different.

He isn’t. 

With a lopsided grin he takes a gentle leap onto the branch, almost as quietly as if the Winter Soldier—or Bucky, for that matter—had done it himself. 

They scale down the tree with practiced ease and Bucky can’t help but think of rusted fire escapes and Steve wheezing in their urban playground, but keeping up with him regardless (at least for a few minutes), grin stuck on his damn face with a ferocity Bucky had always admired. 

“I feel like a dame sneaking out of her folks’ house for a date,” Steve chuckles, running an anxious hand through his hair, “Dinner and dancing past curfew.”

There’s a low growl and a shifting in his stomach. Bucky barely recognizes the feeling as he stares at himself in disbelief. _Hunger._

“When was the last time you ate?” The Soldier doesn’t know. He’s never had to feed himself. He knows how to, it’s in his programming. But it didn’t occur to him that he was hungry. The idea of wanting something like that is distant, a stolen memory of days when he didn’t quite have enough to eat because the only thing that mattered was Steve getting warm food to eat and not getting sick and Steve having his medicines, especially for his anemia. 

“C’mon,” Steve doesn’t seem to expect him to talk and he’s grateful for it, “I think there’s a 24-hour burger joint nearby.” The Soldier remembers cataloguing that as he followed the Black Widow. Bucky thinks that Steve must have asked his red-headed—colleague? Friend?—about the area. Steve always wanted to know about the history of places they holed up during the war. Probably the curious part of him left over from days spent too sick to do much but sketch his surroundings.

The information continues to flow into his head as he observes Steve. How his dark brows and long lashes stayed the same, but how his shoulders—previously only the width of a child’s—became bigger than his own. How a molar Steve had lost in a fight grew back, surprising Bucky one day when the Captain had thrown back his head to laugh at something Dum-Dum had said.

Just processing it is difficult enough. He stays silent. 

They walk about half a mile in the dim streetlight, where both of them can see perfectly regardless, shoulders touching as they walk, before the red open sign and cheerfully yellow interior of the diner greet them. Steve holds open the door for him as they enter the nearly empty restaurant and Bucky thinks to himself that it may as well be a date at this point. 

The waitress hands them menus and asks them what they want to drink. Bucky stares blankly at her, so Steve orders them water. 

Water. Simple. He can do water. 

There are more options than he can fathom and Steve calmly starts listing off a few basic meals, “I was thinking I’d get the cowboy burger. It’s got these fried crunchy things in it. I’m not entirely sure what they are, but they taste good. If you like cheese, you can get a cheeseburger, there are bacon cheeseburgers too. But since you probably haven’t eaten in a while, maybe you should get a double.” 

So when the waitress comes back with waters, he’s able to say “Double bacon cheeseburger,” even though he thinks the last time he had a burger there weren’t nearly this many types. But that was probably also more than half a century ago. Lamb, bison, turkey, wheat, ciabatta, bulkie roll. He’s just relieved that the name of the food pretty much includes all the ingredients. 

“You liked burgers. Said there was nothing better than a good burger after a long day at work. Well, you said there were other things you liked better after a long day at work too, but that those were between you and your… dates.” Steve gulps at the end. He had been focusing on the edge of the table, linoleum peeling slightly, but looking in Bucky’s eyes made him stop short.

“Why did I go on dates when I had you?” Bucky’s curiosity is genuine. Most of his recently gained memories are Steve-centered or of blood on pavement, and the ones about Steve at least don’t leave him nauseous. 

Steve laughs a little at his question—but not at Bucky—cheeks pink, “Because I was Shrimpy Sickly Steve and it was the Depression, and then it was the war and I was still Shrimpy Steve. And then I wasn’t sick or small, but we were a little busy taking down Hydra.” His finger worries at the edge of the napkin still rolled tightly around a knife and fork. Bucky wants to keep him from fidgeting, to get him back into the relaxed state of the night before.

To get him back in his arms like the night before.

“I liked you skinny. Not sickly. But Shrimpy Steve wasn’t bad.” Steve looks up, eyes shining and piercingly blue in the warm light of the diner. And God if that face of surprise and that shy glow of contentment after a compliment weren’t the same regardless of what size Steve was, he’d be damned. 

Steve is saved from having to say anything else by the arrival of their food. The large basket of fries accompanying the burgers is enough to make him remember what fries are, what they look like, and the smell alone makes him ravenous. He shoves a few in his mouth, but they’re missing something. 

_Ketchup._ And Steve’s already squeezing a hefty amount into a tidy corner and how had Bucky forgotten this?

As he scarfs down at least ten more fries dunked in the sauce, he catches Steve grinning at him. The guy hadn’t even touched his food yet, apparently enjoying the view of Bucky’s catching-up session with American cuisine. Or any cuisine at all. The Soldier remembers tubes and protein supplements and pills dutifully swallowed. 

Not blessed food between his teeth and salt on his lips, and when he takes a bite of the burger, grease dribbling down his chin, he thinks it must be heaven. He ends up eating his burger, most of the basket of fries—Steve does help a little with those—and more than half of Steve’s burger. 

He wipes his face with the napkin and drinks down the rest of his second glass of water. 

“Good?” Steve asks, barely concealing a grin. 

He nods, “Better than a windless day and a clear thousand-meter shot.” Realizing what he had just said, Bucky sits up, tense, worried that he had just fucked up whatever good thing they had here, but the little punk is chuckling and fishing for decent fries in the picked-over basket. Apparently he was used to Bucky being a killer.

“One time you said you would never need to have sex again if you could just sit in a sniper’s nest all day.” He smirks. The Winter Soldier and Bucky had something in common.

More surprising to him, is that he remembers the encounter, “Morita asked if I needed something to clean the spunk out of my nest after.” Even more surprising is that he’s laughing along with Steve, his chest heaving like he’d just run a mile, and his cheeks hurt from smiling.

“And Dernier just said, face straight, ‘Je comprends’ in the filthiest tone of voice,” Steve gasps out, face red from laughter. 

“Half of us didn’t even speak French and we all understood exactly what he fucking meant, the frog bastard.” As their laughter fades, the tension that had disappeared comes back, crackling and charging the air between them. 

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice is small and both the Soldier and Bucky are fully aware at this moment, invested in wherever he and Steve were going.

“I have his memories, some of them,” He speaks slowly, because each word takes effort and thought and he doesn’t want to screw this up, “Sometimes even his thoughts, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be him. But whoever I am wants to protect you.” 

_Whoever I am loves you like he did—or maybe in a new way—and I don’t know what to do with that._

“I don’t need your protection. I just want you to be there.” _By my side,_ goes unsaid.

“Till the end of the line,” He says with a grin to hide the feeling behind the words. Steve breathes out in relief and joy, a soft noise that aches in the hollows of Bucky’s mind and reminds him of how much he wants the man before him. And now that he knows what burgers are again, hell yes, he wants them too, and anything else he could experience with the man in front of him. The feeling of want is tangible, heated in his gut and fluttering in his chest and buzzing in his head and he can’t help but stare at the moue of Steve’s lips and wonder if they still taste salty from the fries. But the waitress is coming back and a deeply buried part of him is fearful of kissing Steve in public because that’s something you could get arrested for and before he can reconcile himself with today’s laws enough to reach across the table and grasp Steve’s hand there’s the hush of the waitress murmuring in his ear and he’s empty again, and his target is sitting across from him, pliant and doe-eyed and unaware and the easiest mark he’s ever seen. 

“убивать”

_Kill._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Je comprends- I understand (because Dernier blows shit up and that's gotta be about as satisfying as Bucky describes shooting to be).
> 
> and the chapter title is not the english word go but five in japanese which apparently Steve speaks as well according to the Marvel wiki who woulda thunk


	6. Seis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fallout of the diner leaves the team scrambling to leave New York.

The fork and knife, previously left unused, are in the Winter Soldier’s hands before Steve can even blink, each slamming down through Steve’s hands and into the table beneath them. Pain blindsides him for a moment, shock making him gasp out a curse before the Soldier’s metal hand is wrapping around his throat, cold and unyielding against the tender skin. 

“Buck—” His air supply is cut off, the flicker of recognition behind the Soldier’s eyes not nearly enough to slack the iron grip on his throat. Steve knows the Winter Soldier could just snap his neck like this, and the fact that he isn’t is either a sign that Bucky’s in there or that the Soldier doesn’t want to finish this so quickly.

Not a moment after the thought hits him, he can breathe again, but he’s being backhanded, hot liquid gushing in his mouth, metallic and sharp, flooding his throat before he can take a decent breath. 

Steve knows his survival is on the line, even if the Soldier is doing the assassin’s equivalent of playing with his food. So he springs into action, pulling his hand quickly through the handle of the knife, knowing it was embedded too far into the table to be pulled out without another hand, the one pinned by the fork. Despite the pain in his hand and the slickness of blood leaking out the wound, he yanks the fork out without preamble, stabbing it gracelessly at the Soldier. He’s is behind Steve, putting him in a chokehold and pulling him out of the booth. Legs flailing before finding purchase on the pleather seat, Steve braces his calves on the back cushions and thrusts his head back, hearing a satisfying crack and feeling blood that isn’t his splattering the back of his neck. He doesn’t have time for regret as he bites on the flesh and blood arm wrapped around him, hard enough that he’s released and has time to scramble across the table and prepare for the next attack.

And then it’s blood and fists, his and the Soldier’s, their fighting inelegant and reminiscent of scraps in back alleys and fights that Steve knew he wasn’t going to win. 

He feels small again. He’s knocked out of his stance on the seat Bucky had vacated with a powerful metal fist to his chin that sends him sprawling to the ground and his entire body aches but all he can think of is a much younger Bucky and a gentle hand on his slim shoulder, _”You had him on the ropes, right?_

But he’s not in a back alley. He’s trapped between the thighs of the Winter Soldier, who is alternating punches with his flesh and metal fists, weight holding Steve down to the tile of the diner floor. There’s a dull knife in his right shoulder and Steve knows that it’s a mistake of the Soldier’s, giving his enemy a weapon. His free left hand should be getting ready to rip it out, but instead Steve is caressing the Soldier’s cheek, smearing more blood on his unshaven jaw, as he pummels Steve, eyes holding something like anger. 

“Buck,” He’s breathing out, shifting underneath the girth of those powerful thighs, seeking friction and harder than he’s ever been and not even ashamed of it because there’s blood in his mouth and he loves the man—machine—who is taking him apart with the blunt instruments that are his fists. 

The Winter Soldier is hard too, Steve can feel his cock through the thin jeans, thick and hard pressing against Steve’s hip insistently. He bucks his hips up into the Soldier and the flesh hand is twisting the knife in his shoulder, metal one holding his throat and _Dear Lord_ the Soldier is kissing him, swallowing his cries with rough teeth and his tongue is fucking in and out of Steve’s mouth and it’s absolutely _filthy_.

His hips are circling above Steve’s, hardness grinding into him and Steve lets out a whimper as the hand around his throat tightens because it feels like an asthma attack or the stutter of his heart because of his arrhythmia and there’s black at the edge of his vision, but he’s still leaking precome into his pants and the Soldier’s biting into his mouth again and it’s a fucking wet dream, it must be, because this is too much, too fast, and, _God,_ Steve loves it.

Steve runs his hands over the Soldier’s hips, trying to press him down even harder, to eliminate the space between them, but then the flesh hand is trapping his hands above his head and Steve knows he could break the hold so easily, but he’s so close and the Winter Soldier is panting into his mouth, breathless enough to make Steve think they’re both on the brink. 

The Soldier’s hand squeezes around his throat again, pressing him into the tiles and Steve viciously bites the tongue that plunders his mouth, taking a sick pleasure in the moan it takes out of the Soldier’s mouth and how his hips dig into Steve’s like a promise of more. There are sirens dancing at the edge of earshot and the Soldier glances up, hearing them too. 

“Let’s finish this,” Steve thinks the hand around his throat is going to finally crush his windpipe and kill him, but it’s removed, he can breathe, and the knife is being jerked out of his shoulder as the Soldier’s teeth tug at his earlobe, “Come for me,” his voice is rough and before Steve knows it he sees white and he’s coming like a teenager in his pants, body spasming underneath that of the Soldier, hips juddering to completion.

A kiss so light he doesn’t know it’s on his lips until it’s gone and the Winter Soldier is escaping out the back. Steve wants to chase after him, but he can’t move and then all too soon Natasha is pulling him up by his wrist and dragging him out of there by the front door, where Stark is suited up. Looking at Steve’s mangled hands, Stark throws him in a fireman’s carry and Steve is grateful because the adrenaline wore off the moment he came and he’s feeling the wounds in his hands and shoulder deeply, and his face feels two sizes too big from bruising. His throat aches and the warm liquid in his pants is now cold and uncomfortable.

It’s not long before they’re at the apartment, where everyone is ready to leave, waiting in the living room with expectant faces.

“You guys didn’t—uh, see… did you?” He asks Natasha after Tony’s suit starts disassembling itself into a small case.

“We didn’t realize you were stupid enough to leave the apartment until I heard the goddamn police call on the scanner.” Fury answers for him. Of course Fury would be listening to the police scanner instead of sleeping. 

“Man with a metal arm fighting a tall, built blond man. Isn’t exactly an inconspicuous report,” Clint deadpans.

“The waitress was Hydra. Triggered him. Said _Kill_ ,” He repeats the Russian and English, “But he didn’t kill me…” Steve trails off, still tasting blood in his mouth and knowing it wasn’t all his. 

“We’re leaving. Got a van. Your friend up to host some fugitives?” Natasha asks, handing him a bag of peas from the freezer.

Steve nods and pulls out his notebook, ever present in his pocket, where Sam Wilson left his contact info, next to the words _Troubleman Soundtrack- Marvin Gaye_. 

Tony hooks up a signal scrambler and hands Steve the phone. Steve punches in the neat numbers left by the VA counselor, hoping that he isn’t asking too much for a new friend. The phone was put on speaker before it was handed to him. Steve suspects it’s because the team doesn’t quite trust him after his stunt that night. He understands.

“Hello?” Sam’s voice is tired, but not fogged from sleep. Steve suspects he was still awake.

“It’s Steve.”

“Hey, how are you man?”

“A little worse for wear,” His voice cracks, but he pushes on, “SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra. My team and I are sort of on the run, but we need a place to stay in DC that wouldn’t already be pinged by Hydra.” 

“I heard that SHIELD was doing political assassinations now. That Senator Amesbury’s death was the first step of a terrorist plot to control the U.S. government. It’s all over the news, not that there’s any proof yet. SHIELD released a statement that it was the Avengers.”

“Hydra’s pinning it on SHIELD. Or I guess on us, now.” The idea of people thinking that they were unjustly killing others made Steve’s stomach queasy. 

“Well, they’re succeeding,” Sam says with a mirthless chuckle. 

“So about that…”

“I got a decent-sized place. You guys can crash. How many?” 

Steve doesn’t even have to do a headcount, he knows his team, and Fury makes one more, “Seven.”

He rattles off an address, “You sound like crap, Rogers. Did something happen to your boy?”

A cough scrapes up Steve’s throat as he chokes on a bit of blood he was trying to swallow down, “He remembered me, but he’s in the wind now.”

“I’m here if you need to talk.” Sam’s tone is so open and kind and Steve would be tempted to take him up on his offer if Hydra wasn’t on their tail. And if everyone weren’t listening. He throws Tony a glance and can tell that he’s worn down the patience of his teammates. 

“Some other time, Sam. Our position’s been compromised and we need to get going. See you in a few hours. And thank you.” 

“Not a problem, man. See you soon.”

He hangs up and gives the phone back to Tony, whose hand closes around it, “Didn’t know you were two-timing Robocop.”

“Says the guy whose superpower is a mechanical suit.” Steve starts to exit the apartment with the others, trying not to get blood on anything on the way out. 

“Touché, Rogers.”

They pile into the van, Steve taking the back seats with Bruce and a medical kit. Steve holds out his hands and Banner whistles at the wounds in the flesh between his thumbs and the bones of his index fingers, “Some part of him must have been in there, because he missed all the veins and nerves that would have really put your hands out of commission.”

Banner cleans the wounds with hydrogen peroxide and binds them with gauze—they had stopped bleeding, but the wound at his shoulder was still leaking sluggishly, “He was there, but… the Soldier was definitely the one in control.” Steve didn’t think about the messiness of the fight, how much more it was like Bucky’s hand-to-hand than the cool perfection of the Winter Soldier. And he definitely didn’t think about the kissing.

His pants were still very uncomfortable, and Steve had the feeling that they would stay that way for the entire trip to DC. Steve certainly wasn’t going to say anything, and there was no outward indication of the come drying in his boxer briefs. 

Steve hopes that Natasha and Tony arrived just as Bucky—the Winter Soldier—was leaving. Mostly to save himself from the embarrassment of explaining the end of the fight. Which was less a fight and more like one of those scandalizing videos that Tony always sent him that gave his computer viruses. 

He had stopped opening any embedded links Tony sent him via email after the third instance.

“So what’s our agenda once we get to DC?” Steve breaches the silence in the van, knowing that, socially, they were all more comfortable with a goal. 

Natasha answers coolly, “Project Insight. Disable it before it can be used against us.” The earthling part of ‘us’ lies just under the surface of her words. Steve’s about to say that Thor doesn’t need to help them if he has Asgardian duties, before he realizes that Thor already caught onto the thread of subtext. He certainly wasn’t an idiot, no matter how well his fool act held up to scrutiny when it came to most social cues.

“This weapon can track people by their DNA, correct?” Thor asks, concern etched over his features.

“Yes.”

“And Dr. Foster’s DNA is in SHIELD databases, is it not?”

“She would presumably be a target, yes,” Fury answers, in a tone that Steve has come to associate with his manipulations.

“Then I will aid in any way that I am able.”

Bruce snorts, “I think the big guy can take down a helicarrier with a good sneeze.” Steve can’t help but crack a grin; Tony and Clint are snickering.

“The software is what needs to be disabled, before the carriers themselves bite the dust. Agent Hill knows the specs of the carriers better than I do. We need to get to her.”

“So we need information on Hill before we can act against Insight?” The idea of waiting any longer makes Steve antsy. Natasha had filled him in on Fury’s pet project, and Steve had been just as angry as her, though his concerns lay more with the man who kept trying to kill him than the guns in the sky that would finish the job if he let them. 

Fury says he knows how to draw her out and they form something of a plan. 

To fill the ensuing silence, Tony puts on a jazz station to distract them from the silence that follows their final decisions, “Old people music for the geriatric in back,” he explains. It’s Nat King Cole, and Steve can remember when ‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’ came out in 1943, just before Austria. The USO girls were in love with his voice, always putting him on the wireless. Steve had caught up on his music shortly after defrosting—Bucky liked dancing to music like that, with a smooth voice and tender piano chords balanced by a big band. Even if Bucky had never heard him, Steve knows Buck would have liked his style.

This is one of his Spanish tunes, “Bésame mucho.” Steve knows what the Spanish means, even though most of the song is in English—another language he picked up unnaturally quick. Natasha gives him a knowing look and Steve just rolls his eyes, letting Banner tend to his shoulder. 

His toes tap along discreetly in his shoe. 

They don’t stop until they reach Sam’s, the van trundling along at the speed limit—about the fastest it can go. Clint and Natasha play an ironic game of ‘I Spy’ that almost ends in violence, were it not for Thor joining. Bruce moves to the passenger seat to talk science with Tony, which leaves Fury—still injured—maneuvering to join Steve in the back. They look a little like patchwork mummies, given the amount of gauze used between the two of them.

Fury doesn’t try to talk to him, and Steve is glad. He’s too caught up in his thoughts for a real conversation. They spend the drive in a silence that is neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. Just silence, excepting the rapid running of Steve’s mind.

Bucky beat him up. This he was sure of. The Soldier’s style is precise, almost graceful in its simplicity, in its vicious minimalism. The brawl in the diner: that had been more like Bucky than he had ever seen the Soldier. Steve thinks that the trigger overrode the good part of Bucky—the part that understood right and wrong. But it didn’t override the most basic aspect of Bucky, which was always taking care of Steve.

Or kissing Steve. Apparently that was buried too deeply to be unseated by brainwashing.

Though Steve had no idea where he had gotten that from; it wasn’t like they could have done that during the war, or even before, no matter how cold the nights got and how much of their skin was pressed together to keep Steve from getting any more sick. 

Of course, Steve had thought about it. A part of him had always been in love with Bucky, not just because he was the one who always protected Steve and the only one who had seen him for who he was before the serum. But because of something deeper. A desire he had suppressed since he first saw Bucky, when they were both growing into being men and Bucky’s broad shoulders and stubbled jaw made him handsome. 

And then Peggy came along and Steve was finally big and healthy, but he was treated like an icon, and she made him feel like a person again, like Bucky always had when he was small and sickly and treated like a child who didn’t know his place. And Steve still can’t help but think that if he had spent more time with Bucky after Zola, he would have seen the darkness within him, noticed the serum before it was too late. 

But it’s been past too late for seventy years. 

“Stop thinking, Rogers. You’re hurting my head.” Fury’s comment is dry and Steve can’t help but chuckle. The guy has a sense of humor that few understand or enjoy, but it’s certainly there.

“I can’t really turn it off, sir.” 

“Maybe just turn down the volume a little.” Fury never told him not to call him sir. He understands that it’s out of respect, not mockery, a concept that few people nowadays grasp. 

“Will do,” He smiles, trying his best to think about happier things. He doesn’t quite get to happy, but he starts thinking about strategies and potential plans for helicarrier take-down, how to divide the team, how best to utilize their skillsets. 

He unconsciously includes Bucky in his half-formed plans and immediately pulls him out of the scenarios, closing his eyes and groaning at his own hopeful nature. His hands hurt and he doesn’t want to think anymore. Leaning back against the headrest, Steve tries to get some shuteye before he’s too busy fighting Hydra—again—to sleep properly.

Steve drifts away to the bickering of Steve and Natasha, broken by Thor’s boisterous laughter, the humming of Fury, and the excited whispers of the scientists up front. 

~  
Bucky is aware. Every inch of his body is aching with heat and it feels like _his_ body for the first time in memory, not one that he’s sharing with the blank slate of confused violence that is the Winter Soldier. He can feel the blood pumping through his veins, the beat of his heart, thumping against his chest, and the press of his cock against the seam of his jeans, hard and sensitive to the least movement.

He presses on, regardless, ducking through alleys and over rooftops. The Winter Soldier doesn’t remember ever being aroused by a kill. Bucky remembers the feeling of protecting Steve, in a sniper’s nest, in a back alley, by his sick bed. It was never exactly something to get a stiff one over. In fact, it was usually after Steve was bloodied up a little that Bucky felt the most riled up. 

The Winter Soldier may be a perfect killing machine, but whoever Bucky was, he liked violence. He wasn’t elegant or efficient or even indifferent, but brutal and ruthless. And he got off on it. 

That much was clear by the heat knotting in his stomach.

And that makes whoever he is—this confused middle ground between Winter Soldier and Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes—well, that makes him dangerous.

He brings himself off in a back alley a block away, quiet and efficient, hand moving over himself rough and dry, just this side of painful. Swallowing back a globule of blood, he remembers the taste of Steve masked by the metallic tang and the solidity of Steve’s body underneath him and he can’t help but let out a gasp as the force of his orgasm startles him.

Bucky’s tucking himself back in, still shaking a little, when the team arrives, shouting, “весна.” 

_Spring._

And then Bucky’s gone and the Winter Soldier’s back in charge, following the orders of the tactical team leader and leading them to the apartment.

It’s already empty, but the Winter Soldier is determined to complete his mission. 

There’s a beep from the team leader’s communicator; Alexander Pierce’s voice crackles from the black speaker, “Bring him in for a wipe. Make it stick this time.” 

~  
 _“Come on, Stevie. You know how rank works. These guys can’t see you paying me special attention, not after what they’ve been through.”_

_“What about what you’ve been through?” Steve’s voice is harsh and louder than he means it to be. Bucky sends him a furtive look, only barely outlined in the moonlight of the forest they’ve chosen as cover to take a breather, regroup. They just crossed back into allied territory, but it’s another few klicks until they’re back at base camp and Steve wants to make sure that Bucky—that everyone—is alright._

_“Go make nice with the boys. Give ‘em a speech. I’m fine.”_

_Steve sighs, “They don’t need a speech. And if anyone asks, I’m asking you for intel on what was happening at the facility.”_

_“They know better than I—”_

_“Bullshit. You were strapped to a table. They said they took you away. What for?”_

_“You gonna say a Hail Mary for that mouth, Stevie? Or are you too big and strong to care about the big guy upstairs anymore, huh, Captain? You see combat? You see God leave a man’s eyes? Tell me about it, Captain Rogers.” Bucky’s just deflecting, fast-talking in full Brooklyn drawl to keep his mouth shut about something else. Steve knows it, but the words hurt all the same._

_“Don’t give me that, Buck. I need to know you’re okay. I need to know you’re not going to drop dead because of Nazi experiments because you’re the only reason I disobeyed orders and—”_

_“You disobeyed orders?” He’s poking at Steve’s chest, jaw set and eyes fierce and he is every inch the peacock Bucky always was, even when worrying about Steve, but there’s something darker in the hollows of his cheeks and the determined set of his shoulders. Steve doesn’t like it._

_He doesn’t even splutter because the response is automatic and bred into him, “Of course I did, they said you were a POW, I couldn’t just leave you there!”_

_“Yes, you could have!”_

_Steve takes a step forward, crowding Bucky against the bare trunk of a tree, threatening in a way he had never been when he was small and his breathing crackled before he’d speak. He sees Bucky swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and him wetting his lips with his tongue, a nervous habit of his that Steve tried not to follow with his eyes. His voice is darker than he means it to be, husky with smoke from the burning compound and overuse, “Like you could have left me after ma’s funeral? Or left me to get beat up in another alley? Huh, Buck?”_

_“Do you think this is some sort of game, Steve? This is war. It’s not a place for people like you.” Bucky moves out of Steve’s space, ducking under his arm, and he’d be damned if that wasn’t the strangest role reversal he’d felt since the serum._

_“What do you mean people like me? People who couldn’t work on the docks or lift things? Ill people?” He stares at the trunk, not wanting to look at the disappointment in Bucky’s eyes. Bucky had been the one person who didn’t treat him as less because he was ill and fragile because of it._

_But treating him well and thinking well of him were apparently two different things._

_“No, you idiot. Good people. Too damn good, Stevie.” His mouth opens in a silent gasp and he turns around, ready to apologize. But Bucky’s already shaking his head in disappointment._

_With a silent tread, Bucky leaves Steve bracketed by the shadows of ancient pines and feeling emptier than anything at the ghosts in his best friend’s eyes._

They’re half an hour away from DC when Steve wakes up, blinking the newly risen sun out of his eyes. Natasha and Clint are alternating naps and Fury is engaged in a staring contest with Thor. Tony spots him in the rearview mirror and smirks, “Sweet dreams, Cap?” Bruce is probably sleeping given the silence from the passenger seat.

Steve swipes a hand over his eyes and groans in lieu of responding.

The billionaire’s voice turned petulant, touching on morose, “I guess not.”

“Sorry if I’m not dreaming of puppies and sunshine when my best friend tried to kill me a few hours ago.” Steve’s voice is far from sleep muddled, coming out sharp and angry rather than sarcastic. He was going for sarcastic. He half-thinks about apologizing before remembering Tony’s near-constant lack of tact and complete lack of apologies. 

“Didn’t seem to me like he tried very hard,” Tony replies.

“You’re probably right.” His hands are already mostly healed and his shoulder only aches faintly. His face is probably already healed, maybe tinged a little brown from the last of the bruises. Bucky or the Winter Soldier would have had to do a lot more to damage him. Most damage was to his pride. And his boxers.

“I’m always right.”

The ride is quiet until they reach a point a few blocks from Sam’s house. They go in teams, taking different routes to the address. Bruce and Fury because Bruce was a living weapon and a doctor. Tony and Natasha because he was scared shitless of her and she would keep him from announcing his presence. That left him to go alone and Clint to help Thor along a nearby route. 

By silent agreement, Steve takes the shortest route to Sam’s, the space between his thumb and hand itching where the skin is knitting together, giving him something to focus on as he makes his way to the small white home.

Natasha and Tony took the second quickest route—mostly because they couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t be recognized. With Natasha’s quick stride and drill sergeant tendencies, and Steve’s unwillingness to seem suspicious by walking his normal pace, they all arrived at the same time.

Sam opens the door with a look between the three of them, not even surprised that they’re arriving in staggered groups, “Hey, man.”

“Sorry about this. We need a place to lay low.”

“Everyone we know is trying to kill us,” Natasha deadpans, unapologetic as she walks into the house and finds the nearby bathroom. The door closes and a rustle of clothes later and Steve can hear her relieved sigh through the thin wall; he can’t help but wonder how long she held it. 

He probably doesn’t want to know.

Steve waits for the others to arrive and helps Sam get them acclimated. Clint makes a beeline for the bathroom as well. While he doesn’t want to be obvious, he only holds off for Bruce to take off his bandages and pronounce him healed before he finally makes it to the bathroom himself. 

When he emerges, Tony is falling asleep in a cup of coffee that Clint is trying to steal. Natasha and Fury are pondering her cuticles, or at least pondering while staring at them, and Thor is engaged in low conversation with Bruce. Sam looks overwhelmed with the guests around his kitchen table and is furiously beating pancake batter while managing a skillet of scrambled eggs. Steve takes pity on him and offers his help. He starts on bacon at Sam’s request. 

“I hope you guys eat this sort of thing.” 

“Eating is pretty important for us. Especially for me and Thor, but Clint will shoot people for coffee and it doesn’t hurt to give him food to balance the effects.”

“Good to know you guys are… mostly human. Or at least work like humans.” The second bit referred to Thor, and Steve couldn’t help but sympathize with the strangeness of entertaining an alien Norse deity. 

“Pretty much.”

They’re silent as they cook up pancakes and serve scrambled eggs with bacon. Steve nudges Sam to reach past him and grab a paper towel to dry off the grease from the bacon. 

“So. I didn’t really get a full grasp on how you were over the phone.”

“Is that your counseling voice?”

“It’s my ‘Captain America looks like he punched a baby and I’m worried’ voice.”

“There has been no baby-punching on my end.” Steve has had a few years to get used to the bluntness of modern humor. He still didn’t find dead baby jokes funny, but he could understand the cynicism and history that led to said comedic standards. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t made horrible jokes about their enemies in the war. When trenches were stacked on the bodies of your friends, you couldn’t help but try to alleviate some of that.

“Doesn’t make you look any less like a puppy who peed on the carpet.” Steve sighs and chuckles at the same time. No babies were harmed in this joke, at least. 

“Also no carpet-peeing.”

“Fine—I guess you’re getting my counselor voice now: What’s got you looking so damn guilty, man?”

“That’s your counselor voice? Seems a little callous for—” 

“Stop deflecting,” Tony groans from where he’s just lost his coffee to Clint’s sleight of hand, “You’re worse than me.”

Steve doesn’t say: ‘I have a lot to be guilty about. That happens when you leave your best friend’s body and it turns out that Hydra hijacked him for a second time and brainwashed him into a lethal assassin.’ Instead he hums nonchalantly and tucks into his food, much to Sam’s chagrin. 

“So how are we getting to Hill?” Natasha asks, stealing the pancake from Clint’s plate while he takes her bacon. 

“You two remember the Lemurian Star?” Fury eating in Sam’s quaint, bare kitchen is a weirdly domestic sight and Steve almost forgets that he’s in something akin to a mission briefing, and responds before his staring got him in trouble. 

“Yes, sir.”

Natasha chuckles, “How could I forget Steve tearing me a new one.”

“Biologically, you don’t have a ‘one’ to begin with,” Tony points out around a mouthful of eggs. 

She raises an eyebrow, and Steve can’t help but think of the saying: _If looks could kill…_

Bruce vocalizes what any man who worked with Natasha would agree with, “Figuratively, even without her new one, she still has more than all of us put together.”

Thor asks Sam what’s going on—oddly, Thor’s the most comfortable with new people out of all of them—and gives a boisterous laugh when it’s explained, “What a Midgardian display of hetero-normalcy. Testicles have naught to do with strength, and the Black Widow is a fearless warrior regardless of what shape her genitals may take.”

Steve doesn’t sigh, mostly because he agrees with Thor and doesn’t want to give the impression of admonishing him. “Good point. But what about the Lemurian Star?”

“Anyone there that shouldn’t have been there?” Fury leads on.

Natasha and Steve’s reactions are automatic, and they let out at the same time, “Sitwell.”

“Bingo.”

Tony bursts out laughing, “See, it’s funny because Steve’s old!” 

They take the high road and ignore him, even Clint, who asks, “So, dumb question, how does the government’s most wanted group of misfits capture a SHIELD officer in broad daylight?”

“You don’t.” Sam takes Fury’s empty plate and replaces it with a file.

“And what’s this?”

“Call it a resume.” Natasha plucks the file out of Fury’s hands and leans back with it. Clearly she’s still not happy with the ex-director of SHIELD.

“Is this Bahklama? The Khalid Khandil mission, that was you?” Clint noticeably sits up straighter, “You didn’t tell me he was a para-rescue,” Natasha chides Steve, passing the picture around the table.

Steve looks at the photo and notices the man next to Sam, “Riley?” He asks, knowing the look Sam has in his eyes as he looks at his friend. As if he had the whole world right there.

“Yeah.” Sam looks away and Steve swallows back his sympathy as he passes along the picture.

Natasha scrutinizes the first page of the file, “I heard they couldn’t bring in the choppers because of RPGs. What did you guys use, a stealth chute?”

“No, these.” Sam throws down another file labeled ‘Falcon.’ 

“I thought you said you were a pilot.” Steve looks at the photo, wide-eyed. He’d known RAF guys who would have given their right ballsack to get their hands on tech like that. Tony probably would too.

“I never said pilot,” Sam’s voice is warm, charming in the way that Bucky always was when he was trying to get a more dangerous position in a mission. 

Steve snaps out of it, “I can’t ask you to do this, Sam. You got out for a good reason.” Losing his best pal made Steve leave the fight pretty darn quick. At least Sam did so in a healthy way.

“Dude, Captain America needs my help. There’s no better reason to get back in.”

Fury’s already ready to conscript Sam before he can speak, “Where can we get our hands on one of these things?”

“Woah, wait a minute. Are we forgetting that I have the Iron Man suit? We have plenty of flying people.” Sam purses his lips, expression torn between bemusement and annoyance. Steve understands the feeling.

Bruce breaks up any in-fighting before it can start, “Do you really want to take down helicarriers with only one flying member of the team? With the only suit you have?” 

“Besides, we need someone who people won’t recognize.”

Tony gives as dramatic a sigh as he can muster, “Fine. Where are the wings, fly-boy?”

“Fort Meade, behind three guarded gates and a twelve-inch steel wall.”

Steve's glance meets the eyes of his team members; Natasha’s shrug seals it for him, “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Besame Mucho means Kiss me a lot and I really love Nat King Cole and I actually speak spanish so hopefully I'll have some characters speaking it at some point. We'll see. Seis is obviously six in spanish
> 
> Also, someone in the comments asked who the waitress was--she's just a hydra operative sent to monitor the area after there were two suspicious stolen cars that showed up nearby (the first one nat and Steve stole and the one they stole after Steve was injured at Camp Lehigh), but I'm probably not going to explicitly say it in the story because it doesn't add anything to it, so there it is, if you were curious.


	7. Sieben

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha, Steve, Clint, and Sam take care of the Sitwell problem while the others hunt down Maria Hill.

The tactical team is taking the Winter Soldier to the bank vault when they get word on Captain America’s whereabouts from satellite imaging, previously SHIELD satellites that now worked in Hydra’s favor. 

Rumlow radios in, “Targets spotted. Diverting bank run to pursue.”

~  
Natasha sets up a parabolic microphone on the rooftop a few buildings away from the restaurant where Sitwell and Stern are having their meeting. They both take a listen in the headphones, one ear on each little speaker. 

Steve wonders if this is another plot to set up the presidency. Or at least sow enough chaos to make nearly any option impossible for the voters, “Listen, I gotta fly home tonight, cause uh...I got some constituency problem, and I gotta press the flesh.”

Sitwell’s voice is calm, open, the kind of voice that makes people want to trust him, “Any constituent in particular, Mr. Senator?”

“Uh...no, not really. Twenty-three, kind of hot. Real hot. You know, wants to be a reporter, I think. I don't know, who listens at that point?”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a problem to me.” 

The people who were surrounding them after their meeting scatter, and Steve knows that the Senator is about to play right into their hands.

“Really? ‘Cause he’s killing my back. Look, this isn’t the place to talk about it.” 

“Of course not, Mr. Senator. I hope you enjoy your trip.” 

“Oh, I will.” They part ways with an embrace and a few things murmured too low for Nat’s tech to pick up and Steve thinks that it’s a little anti-climactic, but is glad that it didn’t put any hiccups in their plan. Sitwell’s phone rings.

Steve knows the ID says Pierce, thanks to Tony’s hacking, but Sam’s on the other end of the line.

“Agent Sitwell, how was lunch? I hear the crab cakes here are delicious.”

“Who is this?” Sitwell’s brow furrows and Sam chuckles into the receiver.

“Good looking guy in the sunglasses, on your ten o’clock.”

Sitwell looks around to the right and Steve wonders how he was ever an agent of SHIELD.

“No, your other ten o’clock.” 

The Hydra spy’s eyes finally land on Sam, who gives him a jaunty little wave. Even Natasha is grinning beside Steve. Sam fits right into their little group.

“There you go.” 

His voice hisses over the receiver, angry, “What do you want?” 

“You’re gonna go around the corner, to your right. There's a grey car, two spaces down. You and I are gonna take a ride.”

“And why would I do that?” Natasha pulls out a small laser and aims it at Sitwell’s silk tie, imitating the red dot of a sniper’s mark. 

“Because that tie looks really expensive, and I’d hate to mess it up.” Hanging up, Sitwell manages to follow Sam’s instructions. Steve and Natasha know what the drill is going to be. They bag up the parabolic mic and try to seem as nonchalant as possible when Clint brings Sitwell up to the roof, throwing him onto the gravel and between the two of them before taking a threatening arms-crossed position by the roof door. 

“Who else is Hydra in SHIELD? Why is Hydra targeting presidential candidates?”

“What are you talking about? The Avengers are the rogue terrorists, not SHIELD.” Sitwell chuckles.

“Really, then why were you on the Lemurian Star?” Steve forces Sitwell to the edge of the rooftop by the collar of a suit that he couldn’t have afforded, even on SHIELD’s generous salaries.

The asshole’s grinning at him, “Is this little display meant to insinuate that you can throw me off the roof? Cause it's really not your style, Rogers.”

“You’re right. It’s not. It’s hers.” Natasha kicks him off the roof with a graceful shove of her foot and Sitwell’s screams echo just right.

“Did you fuck the Winter Soldier?”

“What?”

“Seriously. You still kinda smell like sex.”

“No!” Steve’s trying not to blush or stammer, not because talking about sex is anything new to him—he did fight in the war and share an apartment with Bucky, ladies’ man extraordinaire, after all—but because talking with Natasha about sex is probably a hell of a lot more frightening than what Sitwell is currently experiencing. 

Steve only thinks that as Sitwell’s gracelessly dropped back onto the roof by Sam, whose mega-watt grin casts a strong contrast to the terror on Jasper Sitwell’s face.

“Hydra’s not trying to take down SHIELD, at least not until it’s no longer useful to them,” He whimpers as Natasha approaches, her face a blank mask that’s a hell of a lot scarier than anything Steve could muster.

“Well, they’re doing a damn good job of it anyways.”

“Have you seen the news? It’s all pinned on the Avengers. Hawkeye or Widow give Amesbury a headshot, securing the country for Captain America’s conservative agenda that favors Stark industries as its main source of capitalistic greed and plunges America back into the ‘40s.”

“And you think the public’s gonna buy that?” Steve growls more than asks, fists clenched by his sides.

“They will in ten hours, after Stern backs Captain America and calls him a pinnacle of American virtue who could never assassinate anyone.” Hydra’s always been about chaos and bloodshed. Ruining Steve and anyone who stands by him as well as confusing the next election, sending the country into a panic, making it seem unstable to its allies, it all fits in the agenda. 

“What about those who still don’t believe?” Steve can’t think that they would be so easily swayed. Not without some sort of confirmation that he’s as evil as Hydra’s making him out to be. 

“Then, in sixteen hours, Insight takes down enough targets that it seems like you and Stern are making a play for a dictatorship.”

“Then why did you send the Winter Soldier after Stern?”

“We originally picked his rival for our patsy, and wanted to make sure we had a reason for you to ‘assassinate’ Stern.” Even though the guy’s scared shitless, he manages weak air quotes, “But he cooperated after Pierce got to him. Just because he likes dick doesn’t mean he’s a liberal.”

“And you’re gonna make sure no one knows about his dirty deeds in exchange for his cooperation, right?” Sam scoffs. The look on Sitwell’s face is enough for him to know that it’s true. 

“Hail fucking Hydra,” Natasha breathes out, a tone that manages to convey her usual deadpan and her worry at the same time. 

“Oh my god, Pierce is gonna kill me!” Steve’s blood is boiling at the idea of people believing in Hydra’s sham, and throwing the whining man off the roof again sounds pretty good to him. 

But Sam is already joining Clint in escorting the guy off the roof and to the car and Natasha’s hand is on his back, a small warmth that makes him slow his breathing and let go of the ire building in his chest, “You okay?”

“Just a little overwhelmed with my plans to become the new Führer. Dictatorship is hard, you know?” Steve keeps his voice light, but he’s still seething inside. There’s nothing worse than a bully and now there will always be people who believed he was after that, even if—even _when_ \--they manage to avert this tactic. To top it all off, as angry as he is, he’s angrier that they used Bucky in the plot to soil his reputation. He’s angrier that they’re implicating his friends in it.

“Careful. Your sarcasm meter is approaching me levels.”

“I think it might be rubbing off on me.”

Natasha goes quiet for a minute, “Do you trust me?”

“Of course,” Steve answers without thinking. She’s saved his life on missions, kept him sane when he didn’t have any other friends at SHIELD, relentlessly tried to set him up on dates and kept his French from getting rusty. Of course he trusted her.

“You’re too damn good, Rogers.” She starts to walk toward the exit, but turns around, “No one’s going to believe a word of this when I’m through with them.”

And Steve believes her.   
~

“Hydra doesn’t like leaks,” Sitwell complains as they cram him in between Natasha and Clint in the back.

Sam gives an exasperated sigh before starting up the car, “So why don’t you try sticking a cork in it.” Both Natasha and Clint give grins, well, twitches of the lips. They seem to approve of the new addition to their band of Most Wanted criminals.

He just hopes that Sam isn’t pulled into the shitstorm they were embroiled in courtesy of Hydra’s revenge scheme. 

“Sixteen hours until Insight launches and we still don’t have Hill,” Clint comments while inspecting his compound bow.

“Fury and Tony are apparently taking care of it with the others.”

“And what about Stern?” Sam asks.

Steve shrugs, “He can say whatever he wants. Words aren’t hurting anyone.”

“Except you.” 

Natasha’s right, but Steve keeps quiet, watching the road as they cross onto the crowded bridge. _Maybe, when all this is over, I should get a car. Bucky and I never had the money for that sort of thing. He always looked at car magazines the same way he looked at pinups. Something with a lot of horsepower…_

Then Steve remembers that he’s not actually at any sort of place to think like that. But for the first time since defrosting, he wants to make plans and think about the future. Because the future isn’t an empty promise anymore.

A future is something he can have. And he’ll be damned if he lets anything compromise that, for him or the rest of his team.

“So we use Sitwell to get to the helicarriers before they get in the air?” 

Natasha confirms Clint’s question with an almost imperceptible nod of her head.

“What? Are you crazy? That is a terrible, terrible idea!” Sitwell barely gets the words out when there’s a loud thud on the roof and a familiar metal hand is smashing through the window and pulling Sitwell out. Clint tries to hold the flailing agent of Hydra, but the grip of the Winter Soldier’s hand wins out, and their Plan A is thrown into oncoming traffic.

Bullets ping through the roof and Steve knows that he’s the only one who could survive a hit from one of them. He pulls the emergency brake, sending the car skidding and the Soldier flying off onto the pavement. 

A car smashes into Sam’s and they’re pushed along the highway with the momentum. Sam hits the gas pedal again, making a tactical retreat, but the same hand that threw Sitwell to his death is plunging through the windshield and pulling the steering wheel out from Sam’s hands.

“Shit!” Natasha’s taking a shot at the Soldier and Clint’s trying to get an EMP arrow from the quiver trapped behind his back. Their attacker jumps over a car and Sam is trying to steer with the rotary left by the lack of steering wheel, but the car is already going off the road.

“Hang on!” Steve breaks open the car door and is glad when two pairs of arms wrap around his midsection and another around his shoulders. Using the car door to break their fall, they slide down the street with a shriek of metal. People are stopped in their cars, screaming and running, and Steve is just glad he doesn’t have to contend with traffic anymore. 

Clint and Sam split off, Sam activating his pack and taking Clint somewhere he can shoot, and an arrow flies true towards the Soldier. 

The Winter Soldier catches the EMP arrow in his flesh hand, flinging it away from himself before it can activate. Sam whistles in appreciation.

“You gotta admit, man, that’s pretty cool.”

“It’s happened before,” Clint shrugs. The resulting expression gracing Sam’s face has no place in a fight of this magnitude. He drops Clint on an overturned tractor-trailer before helping the driver out of the truck. 

Steve and Natasha are on the lower street level, flung off the bridge by the momentum of the car door. 

“This is familiar,” Natasha quips after Steve unfurls his body from around hers, referring to their stunt from just a few days ago with the elevator.

“There are more people shooting at us,” Steve agrees, ducking away to help some civilians find cover.

Natasha takes potshots at the men around the Winter Soldier. She doesn’t intend to hit him—Steve would (try to) kill her if she hurt him—but there’s shrapnel flung wide from grenades thrown from the bridge and Natasha gets knocked off balance while she shoots. 

Her bullet bounces off the Soldier’s metal shoulder. Shots he was taking at Steve are now redirected at her, and the expression on the assassin’s face is near murderous as he makes his way down from the bridge, dropping onto a car and denting the top, continuing to walk, automatic machine gun spitting bullets at the place Natasha was. 

Steve sees it, but can’t make his way over until he’s ushered the last group of civilians into a nearby building. And then he’s being attacked by the Winter Soldier’s tac team and he has to defend himself. He’s glad he brought along his shield as bullets ping off of its scarred surface.

Of course, there’s a civilian—a damn kid—hiding under a car, and his attention is diverted from Nat’s plight. 

~  
“Civilians threatened. I make an LZ, twenty-three hundred block at Virginia Avenue. Rendezvous two minutes.”

Natasha recorded her frantic communiques into her phone and whispered a prayer under her breath as she tumbled across the street, hiding behind overturned and abandoned vehicles, leaving the phone behind her. 

A hail of bullets pounded into the car, under which her phone was still calling, “Civilians threatened. Repeat, civilians threatened.”

The street went quiet, the dull roar of civilians screaming a background static to, “Civilians threatened. I make an LZ, twenty-three hundred block at Virginia Avenue. Rendezvous two minutes.”

There’s a click, and the tinkle of metal on pavement and Natasha knows what’s coming, braces herself for the shockwave and covers herself from shrapnel. Then her ears are ringing and her eyes are watering. Slowly, the Winter Soldier walks towards where he had just thrown a grenade.

“Repeat, Civilian’s threatened.” He sees the phone. _Shit. How is that thing still on?_

But by then she’s already making her move, jumping onto his back and whispering “дремать.” But the Soldier’s not collapsing beneath her this time and the Clint is busy firing arrows at the Soldier’s buddies, and Sam’s evacuating civilians and he’s throwing her off.

She runs.

Something in her remembers his fighting, the brutality of it, and doesn’t want to experience it ever again. There are civilians standing around and _God_ does she hate having to be the good guy now, “Get out of the way! Stay out of the way!” 

Her voice is hoarse and tight from the smoke in the air after the grenade went off and she should have been paying attention to the Soldier because there’s a gunshot she barely recognizes and a sense of warmth before pain tingling in her shoulder, stretching down her arm, and then expanding fast, too painful for all her training to conceal and she knows that the Winter Soldier is going to kill her as he approaches.

But she remembers the last time this happened and not being able to fight back then, too. 

And part of her sympathizes with Steve’s Bucky or his damn Soldier—even though he just shot her—because she just doesn’t _remember_ why she can’t do anything but hold her breath as he advances across the pavement. 

~  
Steve sees Natasha clutch her shoulder and is there before the Soldier can finish the job. He’s dodging the knife that the Soldier pulls out of his belt, but he’s focusing on what to say as much as he is staying alive.

“Bucky,” the knife just misses his throat. His shield clangs against the arm. The sound vibrates through the air and masks what Steve’s trying to say. 

“Please remember me. Your name is,” He’s being thrown back. There are bullets flying past and he hides behind the shield, making himself as small as possible. Then he’s somersaulting forward, trying to get close enough, as if his proximity could help him remember.

But he’s hiding behind another car as bullets dance through the air and this is why Steve doesn’t like guns. So he vaults over the car and kicks the automatic sub-machine gun out of Bucky’s metal hand, but there’s already a pistol pulled out of its holster and Steve can barely get the “James—” out before he’s hiding behind his shield again.

The Soldier has the shield because Steve tried to drive it into the Soldier’s gut to wind him to no avail. Steve spins around like a top trying to hold onto the shield, a daft tug of war that ends with the Soldier flinging the shield at Steve and embedding it into the back of a van. 

“Your name is Bucky Barnes!” The knife on the other side of his belt is out, this one hooked with a serrated edge, and Steve’s barely keeping up, but he lands a kick on the Soldier’s thigh, sending him reeling into the side of a car, and hits the knife out of his hand in the process.

Steve places his body over the Soldier’s, trying in equal parts to restrain him and, he hates to think it, but to get _some_ kind of reaction out of him. 

“Bucky, it’s me, it’s Steve.” 

“Steve?” 

“Yeah, Buck, it’s me. I’m here.” Steve has a blindspot a mile wide for Bucky Barnes, but even he sees the knife coming out of the assassin’s pocket, hovering above Steve’s back like a viper poised for attack. 

The unmistakable whoosh of an arrow brings him to the realization and the Winter Soldier recoils as if stung, arrow sticking out of his flesh arm like one of the party gag arrows—barely even bleeding. Steve backs up, out of the Soldier’s space.

The arrow is ripped out and stabbed at him—grazing his cheek and his ear hurts like it’s been torn—and they’re back in the fight.

Steve rips his shield out of the van and there’s a gun pointed at him and he’s not fast enough. 

“Bucky…”

He knows he’s about to get shot in the street by his best friend and he wouldn’t dare close his eyes because at least Bucky would be the last thing he sees. _Like he should have been. God. I should have flung myself off that train after him. Because there’s nothing else. No one else._

Then Sam’s knocking him over, flying in like a goddamn angel and Natasha’s let off a shoulder-fired missile and there’s orange and heat and shock rolling through him like vertigo and Bucky’s gone.

He hears sirens and he knows SHIELD—Hydra—is coming, but he can’t help but stare at the spot where Bucky almost killed him. 

A black SUV with tinted windows is pulling up as Sam’s wings fold into their pack and Clint comes down from his perch atop a Bank of America and Steve only hopes that the car isn’t Hydra. Because he’s tired as hell and wants to sit down and drink at least three whole bottles of water and potentially eat his weight in pasta and breadsticks.

“Looks like we missed the party!” The driver’s seat window rolls down to reveal Agent Hill, who was apparently babysitting Tony, the jubilant passenger.

“SHIELD is about to show up and I’m shot. Open the fucking door.” Natasha’s appeared by the passenger doors and is standing outside them, tugging at the handle with her bad arm—staunching the bleeding with the good hand and the wadded ball of her jacket—and the image makes Steve smile because Tony’s genuinely trying to unlock the door and Natasha is continuing to pull at the handle. Sam starts laughing, and Clint’s snorting while he grabs Natasha’s arm and makes her wait for the car to unlock. She nudges her forehead to his shoulder, a cat-like gesture that’s so very Natasha.

Steve’s smiling by the time they manage to get in the car and Clint even lets him take care of Natasha’s wounds—he feels guilty and has an inkling he’s going to be paying for this with a fate worse than bad movie night—but as he cleans and bandages the wound, she rests her hand over his and says, “I’m sorry,” and he’s so befuddled that he stops wrapping the gauze for a moment. 

“What?”

“The Winter Soldier placated you by playing with your feelings. Pretending he knew, to… Let’s just say that it’s a very Red Room move and I might have invented it and I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you invented…” Natasha’s hand is on his cheek and it stings and his sentence is terminated with a wince.

“I think I might have known him. Before Iran… I don’t remember. I thought I had gotten back all the things they erased from my mind. Not who I really was, but at least the Black Widow training and—but I think I knew him.”

He ties down the last wrapping, silence stunned but hands still moving out of habit. 

“You said the Red Room knew the value of a pretty face.” The comment isn’t accusatory. But he knows that she couldn’t possibly have known what his face looked like from Iran. The Winter Soldier always wore a mask. Before the damn charity gala. 

To think Steve might have fought him and not known, had circumstances been any different—he doesn’t want to think about it.

Natasha’s swabbing rubbing alcohol over his cheek and her voice is cold when she informs him that the top of his ear is torn up pretty bad. He hadn’t even noticed the pain, but he can’t stand the walls in her voice and the blankness of her mask. 

Because it meant that she was hurting. 

Steve grabs her hand, staying it, pulling it into his own, “We can help you remember. We’ll find a way.”

Everyone else in the car is being a little too quiet and Steve is aware that he and Natasha are close for platonic friends, but perhaps a little too close for a crowded car.

“I’m not sure I want to,” She murmurs as she gingerly tapes his ear together, in the hopes that it would heal straight. 

They settle back into their seats, and the dull roar of Tony arguing with Maria covers their voices. It feels like giving confessional in a fairground. Something private made startlingly public. “Your decision. But Bucky will probably… well, hopefully I’ll be visiting the experts either way.” 

“What was he like?” 

His throat closes a little before he can bring himself to speak, and even then, the words stop in his throat, and he lets out a noise somewhere between a whimper and a groan, unable to form the words no matter how many times he licks his lips and lets out half a word. 

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I just… even when I had nothing, I had Bucky.” It felt like sacrilege to not be able to find the words to sing his praises. But everything he wanted to say, he wanted to say to Bucky, thanking him for all the times he had saved Steve, for all the times he had made Steve smile through a bloody nose and a hacking cough. 

Well, it just seemed like he should tell Bucky that before anyone else. 

~  
The cold air of the bank vault hits him hard after the heat of summer and the black of his tactical gear, which they had shoved onto him before sending him out to finish his mission.

He failed. Again.

That’s three failed missions, all within days of each other and why on earth were these people so hard to kill? And why did the name Steve ring within him, reverberating and filling up the empty cavities in his chest? 

“Mission report.”

The explanation wasn’t forthcoming from his handlers, but that didn’t stop him from seeing blue eyes and thin, long-fingered hands wrapped around his bicep and skin pallid from sickness. It wasn’t the man he saw on the bridge, but a smaller man with the same face. 

“Mission report, now!”

“The man on the bridge. I knew him.”

“Yes.” An exasperated sigh into a palm, “He’s been your target for two missions now and you’ve failed to complete both. Not to mention the mission before that, which you also failed to complete.” He understands the fact, on a basic level, but all he can think of is warm breath skating across his lips and fluttering eyelashes like dark wings against flushed skin. 

Pierce and the tactical team leader—Rumlow?—leave his vision for a moment, ducking outside the vault. But he can still hear them as a doctor methodically cleans the arrow wound in his arm. 

“We shouldn’t have left him programmed for sex ops. That’s the only reason he hasn’t managed to finish—”

“You’re telling me he that because Captain America’s a pretty boy, he’s not doing what he’s programmed to do? That’s bullshit, Rumlow, and you know it.” There’s a shifting of fabric, as if someone is crossing their arms. It sounds like suit fabric; too quiet to be the stiff tactical gear they have. 

“I think it might be a combination. Obviously he and Cap were close before, plus he was already programmed to like dick. Why wouldn’t he want a piece of America’s finest? Especially if it’s someone he remembers.”

“He’s not supposed to _want_ or _remember_ ; he’s a machine you said I could program. Now it’s going all ‘I, Robot’ on me and you’re telling me that it wants Steve Rogers’ dick?”

 _Steven Grant Rogers._ The name doesn’t feel like something he read off a file. There’s a certain smell to it, like sunshine after rain, and a taste that fills his mouth like honey, and the name speaks of blue and gold. Not a manila file folder. 

“I’m just saying. We need to follow proper protocols so that this doesn’t happen again. Full wipes, only thirty-six hours in the field. Full tactical, no additive programming.”

“Then he’s your responsibility. On your head be it.” Only Pierce emerges from behind the glorified partition of the vault door, approaching him slowly. The Soldier can’t help but want to shrink back into his seat. 

“Mission report, now.” The words are a low growl.

“I knew him.” Then there’s pain in his jaw and blood in his mouth and rubber shoved between his teeth and he’s screaming through the bit, holding onto blue and gold like a lifeline until it’s erased with red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sieben is seven in German   
> “дремать.” -slumber  
> also for those who didn't catch it the winter soldier catching the arrow is a reference to when Loki caught one of Clint's arrows in the Avengers  
> And also this story isn't supposed to be heavily AU, it's just a movie rewrite with the avengers in it and some political stuff thrown in for added interest (and also Natasha's training w/ the winter soldier which I'm excited to explore). E.g. Bucky's going to get worse before he gets better and I'm totally not sorry because it has to happen.


	8. هشت

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team gears up to take down Hydra.

There’s a city-wide traffic jam because of the whole incident, but Hill knows the back-roads of the capital like the back of her hand, and navigates them silently, the car moving like a shark through streets clogged with traffic and towards the emptier streets of the suburban edge of town. 

Agent—well, not an agent anymore—Maria Hill pulls up in front of Sam’s house, and Tony turns towards the back seat, mouth running as per usual. “We’re holed up in a safe house. If you want to stay out of this, it’s your choice. But you know, superhero stuff, and you’re kind of like a superhero, so you may as well stay on. But if you want to go, by all means, go.” The statement is directed at Sam.

His laughter fills the car, rich and hardly even forced, “Hell no, man. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You got it,” Hill quips before stepping on the gas. 

They make it to the safe house, which is more of an abandoned bunker than the literal safe house he and Natasha had visited some days ago. The inside is dank and Bruce takes over seeing to their wounds, giving them proper stitching while Fury and the rest of the team looks on. Steve hadn’t even noticed the bullet graze on Sam’s thigh. He was caught up in thinking about Bucky. And how the hell Natasha knew the Winter Soldier. 

“So you’re the new Putin of America?”

“That’s what they want people to think,” Steve says, taking a gulp of blue liquid from a bottle Tony had handed him, saying that he needed to ‘replenish his electrolytes.’ It’s almost overly sweet, but the sugar would probably help him heal faster, so he drinks it down anyways. 

Clint snorts, “How’d someone believe that?”

“In seven hours, a bunch of people are going to. People already do. And we still have to protect their easily-manipulated asses,” Tony gripes from where he’s bent over Sam’s spread out wings, fixing circuitry damaged by bullet holes. Steve hopes they have full Kevlar for Sam to use, because there were more of those little holes and dents filled with half-melted slugs than he was comfortable with. 

They’re mostly patched up, and Thor is returning to the bunker with a bashful smile and a black plastic case in hand, the second of which he gives to Agent Hill, saying “Heimdall did not appreciate being used as, what you would probably call a ‘taxi service,’ but he understood our urgency. I may owe him a favor, but I have your targeting blades.”

Hill puts the case on the table, opening it up to reveal three large microchips, green and lined with thin lines of metallic circuits.

“And what the hell are those?” Sam asks, voicing Steve’s thoughts.

Maria’s tone is calculated, “Once the Helicarriers reach three thousand feet, they'll triangulate with Insight satellites becoming fully weaponized.”

“We need to breach those carriers and replace their targeting blades with our own,” Fury finishes.

Stark plucks one of them out of their sheaths, tossing it from palm to palm, “Let me guess? We need all three or a lot of people die. Good thing we’ve got more than enough flyboys. Right?” His eyes shift to Sam and Thor.

Fury lets out a puff of air in contradiction, “As much as I want us all on the Insight carriers, there might be a little kink in that plan.”

Hill manages to wrest the chip back from Tony, placing it back in the case and closing it gently.

Natasha grits her way through the first question, “And how is there a kink in that plan, Nick? Do you have any more morally dubious projects headed by Hydra?”

“We need someone in the Council’s meeting to keep an eye on Pierce. And one of the flyboys needs to take care of Stern before he can go live.”

“Respectfully, no one’s _taking care_ of anyone, Sir,” Steve orders, putting his hands down on the table definitively, prepared to go toe to toe in an argument with Fury.

“Of course not,” Hill surprises him, “Someone just has to kidnap him for long enough that we can deal with this situation first.” 

Thor raises the hand with his hammer in it, “I would happily keep company with the Senator. Perhaps he can teach me about Midgardian politics.”

“Not exactly sure he’s the person you want to model your political views after,” Sam mutters. 

Fury nods, “That’s fine. You take the Senator.”

“I’ll take the Council,” Natasha says, “I’m not Steve. I need time for my shoulder to heal.” She sends him a small smile that softens the blow of her callously delivered words. Steve gives one back, knowing that her smiles were a gift more than a courtesy. 

“Banner and I can take operations and act as a rendezvous for medical attention,” Hill says after a short discussion with the doctor. They’d had him avoiding combat for so long that Steve was hardly surprised. The Hulk was messy, and Bruce was never quite the same after an episode. 

“Please pay attention to your injuries,” Bruce sends Steve a glance that lets him know that the comment is directed towards him. 

“I’d like to give Pierce a piece of my mind. If you’ll let me be your back up, that is,” Fury says, casting a hopeful eye towards Natasha. She gives him an almost imperceptible nod and that’s enough.

“So, once Stark, Flyboy Number Two, and Cap get on the carriers with Clint as long-range backup; it needs to be assumed that everyone there is Hydra. Get past them, insert the chips, and we’ll try to salvage what’s left.” 

Steve jumps in with a shake of his head, “We're not salvaging anything. We're not just taking down the carriers, Nick, we're taking down SHIELD.”

Fury’s one-eyed glare would wither most men’s balls to raisins, but Steve knows that glare, Colonel Philips had given it to him enough that he can weather it, “SHIELD had nothing to do with it.”

“The moment you sent me and Natasha onto the Lemurian Star and put us on different missions, the moment you brought us in to get the Winter Soldier, you made this personal. You gave me this mission, this is how it ends. SHIELD's been compromised, you've said so yourself. Hydra was right under your nose and nobody noticed.”

“Why do you think we're meeting in this cave? I noticed.” Fury’s voice is tired, but filled with ire. He’s still trying to justify his actions and Steve doesn’t want to hear it. 

“And how many paid the price before you did?” _Christ, how does he not see it?_

“Look, I didn't know about Barnes.”

Steve’s jaw clenches and he shakes his head to rid himself of the anger, “Even if you had, would you have told me? Or would you have compartmentalized that too?” Fury is silent. “SHIELD, Hydra, it all goes.” 

Hill nods and her voice is firm but quiet when she agrees, “He's right.”

Fury scans the room, as if looking for an ally in the eyes of his companions, but even Clint, whose known nothing but SHIELD for a long time, doesn’t make a sound. He glances at Sam, who chuckles, “Don't look at me. I do what he does, just slower.”

“Well,” Fury spreads his hands, a gesture of futility, “Looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain.” 

~  
They finalize plans and strategies for hours, going over schematics Hill brought with her. “Where’d they even find you?” Steve asks Maria when they break to scarf down half-cooked cans of ravioli. 

“At work.”

Steve shouldn’t be surprised, but he is. “Oh?”

“Just because the Avengers became enemy number one didn’t mean my job stopped. I was interim Director. It was a pretty sweet gig.”

“And you came back because…?” Steve can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have been helpful for her to stay on the inside, even as a puppet head for Pierce. 

“Iron Man knocked on my office window,” Hill smirks. 

And that was that.

Thor leaves to complete his mission, embracing each of them before taking a mildly less flashy exit—starting a storm before riding the lightning out of there. Steve says goodbye to him last, on the bridge atop the fort, feeling like he needed to thank Thor especially for taking care of Stern, and thus keeping Steve’s image unstained. Steve didn’t really care, but Fury wasn’t budging that it needed to be taken care of, and he wasn’t going to say no to his ass being saved. 

He thinks of all the times he’s been too stubborn to ask for help and regret fills him, bitter in his mouth like vitriol. 

_“We looked for you after. My folks wanted to give you a ride from the cemetery.” Steve looks down, but refuses to be ashamed that he left his mother’s funeral after he shoveled the first meager offering of dirt on top of the ‘coffin,’ watching the dry dirt fall into the panels of the cheapest pine box they had and refusing to let his own tears leak from pinched eyes._

_They shuffle the next few steps towards Steve’s apartment, hovering by the door, “I know, I'm sorry. I just...kind of wanted to be alone.”_

_“How was it?” Bucky phrases it to make it seem like he’s asking how the funeral was, as if he wasn’t there, not asking if Steve’s alright, how it was for Steve._

_“It was okay. She's next to Dad.” He comforts himself thinking that they’re finally together again, after all these years._

_Bucky leans against the wall, all casual-like, and Steve knows what’s about to come out of his mouth. It’s an offer that’s been made at least three times since Ma’s death, “I was gonna ask...”_

_“I know what you're gonna say, Buck, I just...” He doesn’t need to lean on Bucky and his steady job. His mother had the rent for the month paid already. All he had to do was get enough for next month painting pictures and he’d be fine. Maybe submit a few sketches to the newspaper._

_But Bucky insists, “We can put the couch cushions on the floor like when we were kids. It'll be fun. All you gotta do is shine my shoes, maybe take out the trash.” And that’s where Steve’s done. He doesn’t want to be a kept boy just because he and Bucky are friends. He tries to find his keys, blood boiling even though he knows Bucky’s just trying to help._

_Bucky picks up the brick they always hid the keys under, handing them to Steve with a sheepish smile, “Come on.”_

_Steve shakes his head before fumbling the keys into the lock, “Thank you, Buck, but I can get by on my own.”_

_“The thing is, you don't have to,” Bucky’s hand is on his shoulder and he’s leaning into Steve’s space, searching his eyes for something, and Steve is reminded with a jolt why he couldn’t live with Bucky. It was bad enough when they were teenagers and Buck started going with girls, but seeing Bucky every time he came back from a date? That would be torture, no matter how good Steve got at ignoring the thoughts he has about his best friend. When his mother was sick and Bucky would come by and help him take care of her, it was easier. He had other things to think about. But now all he felt was the emptiness of the apartment and how easy it would be if Bucky could fill that space._

_He doesn’t shrug out of Bucky’s embrace, but he averts his gaze, focusing on a point behind Bucky’s shoulder, “I'm with you till the end of the line, pal.” And shit, Steve looks back and he’s entrapped in the honesty filling Bucky’s clear eyes._

_Buck just wants to help him. And Steve just plain doesn’t want to be alone right now, not when the only person who still cared was right there, “Why don’t you come in? I’ll make you dinner.”_

_Then Bucky’s pushing him into the apartment and onto the ratty old couch, talking a million miles a minute, “No you won’t. You’re going to sit down and take a load off. Did you take your anemia pills today? Did you eat before the funeral?”_

_He shoves the bottle of pills into Steve’s hand and starts going through the cabinets, finding things Steve didn’t even know were still there, putting together the first decent meal Steve’s had in the week since his ma’s passing._

_And as the smell of home cooking fills up the apartment, and the silence is broken with Bucky’s nonstop chatter, the apartment feels like home for the first time since Sarah Rogers left it._

“Steve?” he drags himself out of the vivid memory, but he can almost smell the potato soup and chipped beef on toast that was their version of a feast. 

Sam looks at him with concern, and Steve looks at his hands, forcing them to relax from where his nails had dug into his palms, leaving behind little half-moon marks.

“He’s gonna be there, you know?”

“I know.”

“You probably don’t want to hear this, and I don’t even know why I’m saying it because if I had Riley back I wouldn’t… It’s just. A lot of people are going to die if this doesn’t succeed. You need to put the mission first.”

“If he’s there and I have to…” Steve doesn’t want to say it.

“I’m not saying kill the guy. But if he doesn’t remember… Hurt him. Break his legs. Fight dirty. Because pulling punches and playing defense is only going to get you and a bunch of other people killed.” Sam didn’t sugarcoat it. He couldn’t. 

“He’ll remember.”

Sam looks like he’s about to say something else when Tony opens the door, popping his head out like a prairie dog, “Oh? You two done having macho military man-pain talk? Good. Suit up.”

Clint hops down from a tree onto the bridge. Steve didn’t even know how he got there, “You gonna wear that?” He raises an eyebrow at Steve’s bloodstained street clothes. 

“No. If you’re gonna fight a war, you gotta wear a uniform.” 

“So I take it we’re going shopping before this extravaganza?” Natasha climbs up from the lower entrance, leaning on the concrete slope of the bunker. 

“Sort of.”

~  
 _I have fucking wings. I fed a Norse god pancakes and held a butch-ass white dude up while he shot a goddamn arrow at a guy with a metal arm. And this is strange?_

But they’re sneaking around the fucking _Smithsonian._ Natasha is using her superspy moves to get past the sensors on the costume stands. Tony is wiping the security footage in his suit, talking to somone named Jarvis. Cap is putting on pieces of clothing one by one while Hill and Natasha ogle him. Clint is distracting the security guy by comparing hearing aid models with him. Fury _was_ stealing a piece of old tech until Sam spotted him, but Fury pocketed it and shrugged, saying that it was for a friend’s ‘collection.’

Sam Wilson flies and now works with superheroes and Tony Stark, who probably wipes his ass with hundred dollar bills, but this is pigs-flying type shit and he doesn’t really know how to deal with that. 

Because Captain America is giggling and happy and apparently stealing may be good for the soul because this is the most chipper he’s ever seen the guy. For that matter, it’s the most content he’s seen most of them. Tony is looking through his dad’s stuff and making fun of the ‘ancient’ tech while Banner nods and pretends that he doesn’t still think it’s cool. Natasha and Hill are enjoying the patriotic view—the ex-Russian spy starts stuffing dollar bills in the clothing as she hands it to Steve. And he and Fury are, well, they’re staring at the meager portion of the exhibit that focuses on Gabe Jones. 

“They don’t even mention that he played the trumpet like another fucking Satchmo. White assholes,” Fury comments with his arms crossed over his chest. Sam chuckles and stares at the case. The only one that’s as small is that of Jim Morita.

There’s no surprise why. 

“You know. When I first met Steve, I was a little worried. Just because he led an integrated unit, the _first_ integrated unit, didn’t mean he was exempt from… the _opinions_ of his time. But he really is all that and more.” Sam didn’t like to hero worship. But he had always hoped that Cap wasn’t secretly of the same mindset of everyone else at that time. 

“I won’t admit that SHIELD monitors its employee’s calls, but the fool boy already called twice about this issue. It’s going to be fixed when the exhibit moves to New York. And if it isn’t, there’ll be hell to pay, according to our good Captain over there.” Growing up, there were Bucky bears and Dum Dum action figures, but not a peep for Gabe Jones or Jim Morita. It was nice to know that Steve not only tolerated the integrated nature of his team, but that he saw the erasure that had been going on since he went under.

Didn’t make it right, but it helped.

“Did your mom ever make you a Gabe Jones bear?”

Sam chuckles and ducks his head, “Yep.”

~  
The Soldier doesn’t quite recognize it as he’s hosed down—“He’s filthy and it’s going to be ten times worse when he comes back.”—but the feeling of water, cold, pelting against his skin like a whip makes him lash out. The scientist’s neck is snapped before she can cry out and orders are being snapped at him in Russian, English, and even Persian, which he recognizes. They gave him the language for a mission in Iran. 

He knows the target’s name, but an unexpected visual accompanies it, a flash of red hair and a frantic swear in Russian. 

Rumlow barges back in and shouts a command in unaccented Russian. He stops struggling. They programmed him to respond to most Russian commands. He had never been that way before, not with the Soviets. It would have been dangerous, especially if he was undercover. But these new handlers didn’t care for the damage he could cause at the briefest mention of a word like _kill_ or _slumber_. They took away the sleep command, but left all the others, including the one that did a temporary wipe sans-machines. They called it spring cleaning and joked about it in the van after using it on him.

He wasn’t supposed to remember that.

They give him a sedative that the leftover scientists say should wear off in a few hours and load him into a dark van with the rest of Rumlow’s STRIKE team. He tries not to think about blue-green eyes even though he can’t figure out which hair color goes with them.

“Alright, Soldier. These are your targets. You’re gonna kill them before they put our helicarriers out of commission.” He’s handed folders with pictures and schematics. He looks at the schematics first, figuring out where his targets are headed.

Then he gets to the folder of targets.

He still can’t quite figure out who those eyes belong to. 

~  
The sun’s reflection is bright and there’s hardly a sound on the flat, glassy plane of the Potomac. Steve looks out on a skyline of white marble buildings that make up the history of a country he died to save. A country he only travelled in tights, and not on the open road with his best friend. A country that’s at its breaking point, but Steve had missed the build-up and now he had to fight for his country again not quite knowing how it got there.

Three years and he still feels like he missed something. He supposes that he’ll always feel that way. 

At least if the Winter Soldier kills him he won’t die on foreign soil, and _God,_ , he thinks with a shudder, he just hopes there’s no water involved because drowning is not the way to go.

Or, if you’re him, a way to stay gone.

“Dude, stop clenching your jaw, you’re gonna get lock-jaw and then where will Barnes be?” Tony chucks him on the chin with a careless finger, “Huh? Oh, come on.”

“I don’t get lock-jaw,” is his reply. He really doesn’t, even after nightmares that leave him grinding his teeth, trying not to breathe in the icy water. Until he does and he wakes up, not with Peggy’s name on his lips, but with Bucky’s. Because all he can see is the Soldier frozen in ice and analyzing him with Bruce and not even recognizing him in the grainy photo. 

Sam and Clint both snicker behind their hands, while Tony wears his patent smirk, “You do realize that I was making an innuendo, right? Trying to lighten the mood. Mr. Hero Jawline, you get?”

Clint slings an arm over his and Sam’s shoulders and Steve tries to smile for their benefit, “Please, it’s called Pensive Hero stance. I do it on rooftops all the time.”

“What, while thinking about fletching and properly-lubed bowstrings?”

“Nah man. Just staring into the distance.”

Natasha clicks into the comms from a little device installed in her earring, “Clint you play Candy Crush on your phone, don’t give me that shit.” She must still be on the ride from the airport to SHIELD. Steve’s still amazed at the mask they put on her. 

There’s the opening of a car door and some walking. He and the others are listening raptly, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“And how was your flight?” Pierce inquires, charming and slick. Steve had only met the man once or twice, but now hatred seethes within him at the sound of the man’s voice. 

Natasha’s voice is saccharine and tart at the same time, Steve still doesn’t understand how she manages to get the accent and the lady’s voice right. “Lovely. The ride from the airport less so,” she says, referring to the traffic and clean-up still going on city-wide.

“Sadly, SHIELD can't control everything.”

“Including Captain America,” A male voice deadpans. Steve can’t help but agree, even though the councilman was probably referring to him being on every government watch list, as opposed to his defending the country from Hydra.

“This facility is biometrically controlled, and these will give you unrestricted access.” Natasha’s communicator clicks out with a rustle of fabric. It’s just her and Fury now. 

Maria and Bruce come around, dragging the bodies of a few security guards that they tuck into an alcove and brandishing the override key for the door they were standing around. Steve holds the door for them after the happy chirp of the mechanism. “You boys ready to stop Hydra from making history?”

“Nope,” Tony says as his suit assembles on his body and the two SHIELD techs turn around, fear evident on their faces when faced with Hill and Sam with guns, Tony with his gauntlets pulsing blue and ready, , Clint with an arrow nocked, and Steve with his shield. 

He suspected he was the least menacing out of the six of them, since almost all SHIELD agents were briefed what Bruce looked like and who exactly the Other Guy was. And Bruce was doing a pretty good job with his own hero jaw from Tony’s side.

~  
Natasha is reluctant to be drinking with Pierce, but she accepts the glass nonetheless, trying very hard to look poised and just-this-side-of-polite without looking murderous. Even if she and Nick weren’t on great terms right now, Fury had trusted this asshole, and Pierce repaid that trust with an attempted hit.

She wanted to tell him where he could shove his bottle of champagne. 

Pierce starts with a pedantic speech and as sick as she was of Steve’s hero shit, she never realized how much she really made fun of them because they roused her spirit, hell, made her a just a little bit patriotic for a country that she wasn’t born in, “I know the road hasn't exactly been smooth, and some of you would have gladly kicked me out of the car along the way. Finally we're here, and the world should be grateful.” But Pierce emulating that open-and-honest speech-giving approach of Steve’s? It made her want to vomit.

“Attention, all SHIELD agents. This is Steve Rogers. You've heard a lot about me over the last few days, some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it's time you know the truth.” _Mr. Honesty strikes again,_ Natasha thinks wryly as she tries to look curious, but not distressed, as that wasn’t exactly in the Councilwoman’s character. 

“SHIELD is not what we thought it was; it's been taken over by Hydra. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The STRIKE and Insight crew are Hydra as well. I don't know how many more, but I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you. They almost have what they want: absolute control. They shot the Nick Fury and it won't end there. If you launch those Helicarriers today, Hydra will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way, unless we stop them. I know I'm asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high, it always has been, and it's a price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not.”

Natasha resists the urge to clap as she gasps and flutters anxiously with her fellow councilmembers. 

~  
Sam raises an eyebrow, “Did you write that down first, or was it off the top of your head?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hasht (هشت) is Persian for eight. I ran out of languages that Steve and Bucky speak according to the Comics Database, so I'm heading into more contextual territory.


	9. November-India-November-Echo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team takes on the Insight helicarriers and Pierce.

“You smug son of a bitch!” Councilman Rockwell lets out, anger evident in the lines of his body. 

She knows that it shouldn’t be funny how surprised the other members of the Council are, but their reactions are nothing short of what someone who worked day in, day out with a traitor would be. So she understood. It’s about how she felt when Brock and the STRIKE team loaded onto that elevator, except that she had always known there was something off about Rumlow.

He was the kind of guy who enjoyed his job a little too much.

Of course Natasha enjoyed parts of what she did. But she mostly did it because she was good at it, and maybe a little because she knew nothing else.

Councilman Singh sighs in relief when two agents enter the room, and he points at Pierce, “Arrest him!” 

The agents turn their guns on the Councilman without hesitation. 

Pierce’s laugh is downright jovial as he spreads his arms, “I guess I’ve got the floor.” Natasha has the feeling that she’s about to endure another speech and tries to restrain her eye-roll.

~  
Loyal SHIELD agents are frantically shouting at the Hydra agents to close the bay door, even after Rumlow forced them to preempt the launch sequence. Hill watches on the monitor, pursing her lips as good people she had worked with get mowed down by the automatic weapons of traitors she had worked with. 

“They’re initiating launch,” she breathes into the comms, worry eating at her.

Banner puts a gentle hand on her shoulder, “They’ll stop Hydra. It’s what they do.”

She sure hopes he’s right. 

~  
“Hey, Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad guys?” Sam says at a jog as they walk onto the airfield where they can see the helicarriers rising from the Potomac, which has opened up to reveal the underground Insight launching area, displacing water in a grand display of brine crashing over the edges like a waterfall. 

Tony answers for him before flying off, “If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad.”

“What he said,” Clint murmurs into the comms, already nested atop the Triskelion. 

Sam shrugs before activating his wings and flying off to the second helicarrier, already rising out of the hole in the Potomac—a phrase which is a strange thing to think and an even stranger thing to _see._

He can hear bullets flying as he hides behind crates, searching for a way onto the helicarriers.

“You know those bad guys? I think I found them,” Sam says.

Steve’s voice floods with concern and he almost forgets to pay attention to his surroundings, “You okay?” An arrow soars past him and lodges in a shooter that was in his blind spot, about to take him down.

“Not dead yet,” Sam deadpans.

Resolving to not use the comms for chatting, he also reminds himself to thank Clint later. 

~  
Pierce is staring out the window, almost as if he were in quiet contemplation and not looking out at a firefight. He turns back to Councilman Singh, who still wears a face of abject horror, “Let me ask you a question. What if Pakistan marched into Mumbai tomorrow, and you knew that they were gonna drag your daughters into a soccer stadium for execution?”

Pierce hands Singh a glass of champagne, raising his eyebrows as if to pacify his comment, “And you could just stop it with a flick of a switch. Would you? Wouldn't you all?” He holds his arms out, open and honest in his expressions, but still with the charm of a snake slithering in his voice.

“Not if it was your switch.” The comment hits with a hard edge and the room goes silent as Singh tosses the glass to the side, a casual but pointed gesture highlighted by the delicate sound of the glass breaking.

Pierce stares at the shattered crystal and gold liquid bleeding onto the floor for a moment before holding out his hand to one of the Hydra agents, who fills it with a gun. Natasha’s moving before the gun even changes hands, knocking Singh away and taking down the Hydra agents before disarming Pierce. It goes so quickly she’s barely aware she’s still in disguise until the councilmen stare at her in shock. 

She turns off the mask and removes her wig with one hand, “I'm sorry. Did I step on your moment?”

~  
Hill thought Banner was going to be her back up, but he’s too busy running around the compound as a medic; when he heard the first few shots go off, he was antsy. Minutes later he was running out the door, saying: “The Other Guy will protect me if I get hit, and these people need my help. I’m sorry.”

With a wry smile she thinks, _I’m surprised it took him this long._

Looking at the footage she hears the weapons tech saying, “Satelites in range at three thousand feet.”

She swears internally, “Falcon, status?”

“Engaging.”

She hears bullets and tries not to think too hard about which of her team members they might be hitting.

~  
The jets chasing him go down, barely making a dent in the massive structure of the helicarrier as they crash into its side before falling into the Potomac, which closed back up after the helicarriers came in range. 

“Alright, Cap, I’m in,” he says as he approaches the exposed underside of the helicarrier, where he was told to replace the targeting blades. Then he hears and nearly _feels_ the heat from a Hydra jet shooting at him, and he’s flying out of there.

He passes Steve fighting his way through the Alpha helicarrier, taking down men left and right with his shield. He’s tempted to help, but Tony comes in on the comms, “Bravo locked.”

“Shit,” Sam says, both in reaction to the jet still shooting at him and the fact that Tony managed to get a targeting blade locked down before him.

“How’d you manage that, Stark?” 

“New feature on the suit. Invisibili—SHIT!”

Sam sees Tony go down, taking the jet that was tailing Sam with it. 

Hill’s voice is urgent, “Bruce, I need you to get to Tony. Clint, cover him. Eight minutes, Cap!” 

“Working on it!” Steve quips from a chokehold. Sam stops evasive maneuvers and heads to the base of the Alpha helicarrier, knowing Steve was doing an ample job distracting the techs there, and that it would be easier to get to Charlie if they teamed up. 

“I’m in,” He puts in the chip, “Alpha locked!” 

There aren’t even any jets tailing him, they’re all too busy being eviscerated by Clint’s precise shots, “Really, Sam?” Cap grunts into the comms as he continues fighting his way through the entire helicarrier staff.

“I’ll give you a ride,” He chuckles, hitting the people around Steve with the semi-automatics Hill handed to him before the mission. But then there’s a heat-seeking missile after him and he’s back in evasive maneuvers. 

And clearly Steve’s still a little peeved that Sam beat him to Alpha, “Raincheck!” 

“Go fuck yourself, Cap.” The missile nearly clips his wings and Steve isn’t laughing anymore. 

The comms are eerily silent as Sam avoids the missile and Steve tries his damndest to fight off thirty trained SHIELD agents. Sam finally manages to shake the missile by making it all the way to the ground and doing a hairpin turn that almost doesn’t work, “Wow, I come back online and Steve’s already cheating on Tin Man with Big Bird.”

Maria Hill lets out a sigh of relief at Tony’s voice. Him staying quiet that long made everyone anxious.

“If anyone’s Big Bird, it’s me,” Clint says as he keeps Tony covered while Bruce drags him to shore. 

“Stark’s not making it back up there. It’s up to you three.”

There’s a scramble of movement over the comms. No one can tell whose line it’s coming from until they hear the scream.

“Make that two of you,” Hill swallows as the arrows stop flying, no longer protecting Bruce as he tries to get Tony and his broken leg to safety.

~  
He wakes up from the drugs with a needle sticking out of his arm. He reaches out and shoves away the man injecting him, hearing something snap and crunch as the man crumples against the concrete wall. 

There’s half a needle sticking out of him and he rips it out, ignoring the blood beading out of the skin as he’s faced with Rumlow. 

“миссия!” He remembers the folders, the specs on the helicarriers, the skill sets and aliases of the people he’s assigned to kill.

The archer is the first to go; he remembers a note in the file about EMP arrows and knows that it’s too much of a risk to be fighting targets of this skill-level when they had a sharpshooter at their back. The Soldier is on the roof, quiet as a mouse after sending out a pulse to deactivate the man’s hearing aids—not SHIELD issue, but almost as easy to neutralize. And then he’s smashing the Hawkeye’s face down on the ledge of the roof before the archer even realizes his hearing aids weren’t working. 

There’s blood and a crack as Clint Barton screams out, and the Winter Soldier smashes the man’s face against the concrete until the whimpers are quiet.

He sees Bruce Banner taking the Iron Man out of harm’s way, one less target he will have to cross off in combat.

The Soldier eyes the helicarriers and the jets taking off from the airfield below, formulating a plan. 

~  
“What are you doing?” Councilman Rockwell asks, brows drawn in concern as Natasha types furiously, trying to get everything done as quickly as possible.

She just wished these assholes would give her a bit more trust considering that she just saved their lives. 

“She's disabling security protocols and dumping all the secrets onto the Internet.” 

_Fucking Pierce,_ is what she thinks.

“Including Hydra's,” is what she says, grace and calm on the outside while panicking inside because the rest of the council is side-eyeing her and she really does not need any more enemies.

“And SHIELD's,” Pierce is back to snake-charmer mode again, approaching her with falsely vulnerable body language and false sympathy in his eyes, “If you do this, none of your past is gonna remain hidden.”

She types harder. 

“Are you sure you're ready for the world to see you as you really are?” Natasha pauses, but doesn’t let her façade break. She knows how scared she is. But that means that they’re just as scared. 

“Are you?”

~  
“Sam, get me to the last helicarrier.” The cheerfulness and banter is drowned out of the comms. They don’t know if Barton’s alive or dead, and Tony’s in bad shape. Natasha’s still radio silent, along with Fury. 

Hill’s tempted to hop on a Quinjet and get up there, but she knows she has to keep an eye on everything. It’s her job. She has to; ‘one port in a storm’ and all that.

“Six minutes, Cap,” She hears gun fire and tries to think about Charlie’s position, forty-five degrees off the port bow, rather than Clint’s position, maybe-dead on a rooftop, or Tony’s with his own suit impaling him after impact. 

_Fuck it._ She makes a twin of the computer on a tablet—cursing the little blue bar as it fills up too slowly until it finally flashes its completion—and runs to find Barton.

_Natasha will never forgive me if I don’t check on him._

_I’ll never forgive me._

"All SHIELD pilots, scramble. We're the only air support Captain Rogers has got.” Maria hears the comment as she flips between security feeds on her tablet, making her way through the maze of the building and avoiding the more popular elevators and stairwells.

Then, the feed flashes by again, and there’s the Winter Soldier throwing Cap’s air support out of a plane and she swears onto the line.

“Winter Soldier is making his way to Charlie, I repeat Winter Soldier incoming!”

Then there’s the tearing sound of metal and she’s made it to the roof and she’s just met Sam but she can’t take two of her team dying at once.

She hears the sound of the parachute opening and lets out a little prayer as she makes it to where Clint lies prostrate and bloody.

_No._

~  
“Disabling the encryption is an executive order, it takes two Alpha Level members.” Pierce sounds so smug Natasha is glad when she can slap the smirk off his face with just a few words. 

“Don't worry, company's coming.”

The sounds of a helicopter whirring through the air greet them. She’s surprised to see Thor and a captive Stern in the front seats, but masks her feelings to smirk at the way Pierce’s face drops when he realizes Hydra’s plan was being thwarted in all arenas. 

When Fury walks in he looks like he should have a soundtrack his stride is so confident, filled with the conviction of a man who was doing right, and Natasha can’t help but think that _this_ is the Nick Fury she knew. 

“Did you get my flowers?”

Fury gives Pierce a one eyed glare that had sent many a man away with tears in their eyes. 

“I'm glad you're here, Nick,” Pierce lies through his teeth as Natasha keeps typing. She knew this was a long-awaited reunion, and not in the good way. 

“Really? ‘Cause I thought you had me killed.”

“You know how the game works.” The man could sell a hammer and sickle to a Russian, but his snake-oil method didn’t work on Fury either. 

“So why make me head of SHIELD?” Natasha knew SHIELD history basics, but Pierce had almost been a non-entity to her except as a friend of Fury’s. There was clearly a chapter she had missed, and it hung in the air between the two men. Old friends, at opposite sides of a modern war. 

“Because you're the best and the most ruthless person I ever met,” It’s the first honest thing that’s come out of Pierce’s mouth all day. 

“I did what I did to protect people.”

“Our enemies are your enemies, Nick. Disorder, war. It's just a matter of time before a dirty bomb goes off in Moscow, or an EMP fries Chicago. Diplomacy? Holding action, a band-aid. And you know where I learned that; Bogota. You didn't ask; you just did what had to be done. I can bring order to the lives of seven billion people by sacrificing twenty million. It's the next step, Nick, if you have the courage to take it.”

“No, I have the courage not to.”

Natasha nods at Fury, both in acknowledgement of her hack finishing and her letting go of her anger at him—for making her a fool, for making her part of something she had just left—because Fury was deceived just like her. She points her gun at Pierce’s head and motions for him to approach the computer.

“Retinal scanner active,” the machine chirps. 

Pierce is back to smug grins, “Don't you know we wiped your clearance from the system?” 

Natasha and Maria Hill are probably the only two people who could distinguish the haughty, proud tone in Fury’s voice from his regular speech pattern. “I know you erased my password, probably deleted my retinal scan, but if you want to stay ahead of me, Mr. Secretary...”

But Pierce got the message when Fury took off his eyepatch.

“You need to keep both eyes open.”

They look into the screen as it analyzes the topography of their eyes, matching it to files stored within SHIELD’s files, “Alpha Level confirmed. Encryption code accepted. Safeguards removed.”

~  
“You could have told me you were going to jump,” Sam grumbles at Steve as he hauls him to the last helicarrier. 

“Didn’t really have a choice.” Sam would usually be making a comment about Steve being as heavy as a ton of bricks—because the son of a bitch really is—but all he can think about is a rooftop and a security shed where their teammates are hurt or dead.

He’s known the guys for about a day. He can’t imagine how Steve must feel, except that he can.

 _Riley._ And he’s seen how the spy, Natasha, how she and Clint look at each other. The utter trust and companionship. She doesn’t even know that her friend is…

Not dead. He can’t be dead.

“Winter Soldier is making his way to Charlie, I repeat Winter Soldier incoming!”

 _Fuck._ He drops Steve on the landing pad of the carrier just as the Winter Soldier comes in for a landing, practically on top of them. In avoiding the nose of the jet, Steve takes a tumble off the side of the beast of a machine they’re standing on. He’s already flying, prepared to catch Steve hurtling towards the water, but there’s a tug on his left wing and a rip and grind as it’s torn off by the Soldier, who proceeds to fling the damn wing at him, sending him hurtling into the sky.

He pulls his chute and hopes Steve is hanging onto something and not drowning in the river.

“Cap? Cap, come in. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” Sam lets out a sigh of relief, “Still on the helicarrier.”

“Where are you?” Steve asks, and Sam can’t bear to disappoint him, but he’s not going anywhere with half a wing in the Potomac.

“I’m grounded, the suit’s down. Sorry, Cap.”

“Don’t worry. I got it.” 

And shit, Sam hopes so as he goes in search of Romanoff and Fury, hoping to enlist some help for Cap. 

“Anyone who can fly or steal a plane in shape to fight?” He asks to the comms.

They’re empty.

Steve’s alone up there.

~  
Thor is as surprised as anyone when Maria Hill calls him on his cellular communication device. He has been relegated to babysitting Senator Stern, and he is glad to be out of the fray for once. When he was younger, the fight made him relish the feeling of being alive, but lately, it had only reminded him of how his tendencies had forced him and his brother apart, even at the last moment of Loki’s life.

Giving life when he could not save his brother’s seemed to be nobler than taking it, and he can’t argue that educating the Senator on how women are treated in Asgard is not a better use of his time.

That is, until Hill calls.

“Thor, do you have magic Asgardian healing powers?”

“I can do basic healing, but it is not generally wise to use our techniques on Midgardians without proper precaution.” Like any warrior, he knew how to tend wounds and even save lives in situations of hemorrhaging or bodily trauma. But he was nothing compared to the great healers of Asgard.

“Clint is… he’s barely breathing. Please, anything you can do. We’re on the roof ten floors above you.” He is already out of the helicopter and spinning Mjolnir when Maria mentions the Hawkeye’s condition. 

He loses his communication device on the way up, forgetting it as he rushes to Agent Hill’s side.

She’s got one hand trying to stop Clint from choking on his own blood and the other on a tablet computer, overseeing the mission.

“I had to do CPR—give him breath—but he’s still… He won’t stop bleeding.” 

Thor casts aside Mjolnir and kneels, recalling all the lessons on healing and magic that his mother and brother had given him, and hoping against hope that he could save his shield-mate like he could not his family.

~  
Hill is torn between watching her tablet and watching Thor work.

“Sir, Council's been breached,” She hears from a Hydra agent, listening to their comms. 

“Repeat dispatch,” Brock Rumlow says, his voice making something churn in her stomach. 

“Black Widow's up there,” The agent repeats.

Rumlow practically growls and Hill wants to shoot him herself, “Headed up.”

She logs back onto their comms, feeling guilty about taking off her earpiece when she reached Barton, “Falcon?”

“Yeah?” He sounds relieved. She can hear sounds of fighting from Steve’s line. 

She takes in a breath and forces herself not to tell him or Steve about Clint, “Rumlow's headed for the Council.”

“I'm on it.”

“Cap! Status! You’ve got four minutes.”

He’s silent, except for breathing and the sounds of a struggle. Hill can’t help but let out something like a sob when she hears the crisp sound of a knife ripping through the air and Cap grunting out on impact. 

Thor looks up at her from where Clint is still wheezing, shaking his head.

~  
“Come on, Bruce. Leave me. You gotta help them.”

They hear the wrench of metal and Sam’s frantic swearing.

“You gotta help, Cap. You’re the only one who can.”

“I’m the just-in-case guy.”

“This IS just-in-case, Bruce, don’t you see? We need the Other Guy right now, or Steve’s going down the same way we all did.” Tony grits his teeth as Bruce does something with his leg. 

“Your own suit is basically a giant piece of shrapnel about two millimeters from your femoral artery. How about you let me worry about the metal sticking out of your leg before I Hulk out on _you._ ” The threat isn’t idle. Bruce is furious at Tony for even suggesting that he turn into that again. 

“Goddamnit, Banner. Steve is going to be gutted by the Soldier and you know it. The Hulk can take him down and Steve can finish the mission without being seriously injured _again._ ” It’s not that saving the day isn’t appealing. It is. But he can’t risk it. 

“What if I kill Bucky?”

“Steve will forgive you if you save millions of people.”

“I haven’t… Tony, I haven’t Hulked out since the Chitauri. I’m not sure… What if I don’t come back?”

Tony stares at him for a long moment, before closing his eyes, focusing on the pain in his leg like an anchor. “If you let Steve or any of those people die…” He opens his eyes, meeting Bruce’s, “I won’t forgive you.”

Bruce had already injected the general anesthetic when Tony was focusing on his pain, and the look of betrayal in Tony’s eyes as he fades into unconsciousness will haunt Bruce. But the idea of being the Other Guy again… it was worse than losing a friend.

He stares up at the helicarriers, now surprisingly quiet except for the hum of the fully automated guns poking out of the belly of the beast. 

And he begs forgiveness even as he starts to get the impacted suit out of Tony with a scalpel and careful help from JARVIS, who removes what can be automatically removed from Tony’s prone form, leaving Bruce with a roadmap of the many shards of metal piercing his friend’s body.

_Don’t worry. I won’t forgive me either._

~  
Steve finally makes it to the glass cage of the targeting blade system, having evaded the Winter Soldier through the entirety of the carrier. 

But he hears footsteps on the metal bridge connecting them and knows that he’s never been good enough to evade Bucky, much less the Winter Soldier.

“People are gonna die, Buck. I can't let that happen.” His voice is pleading but determined. Steve told Sam he was here to complete the mission, and he was.

And, God, all he wanted to do was reach out for Bucky, shake off the cold of his eyes and of the elevation within his embrace like he had in so many long winters. But it wasn’t 1939 and they weren’t barely-men with no responsibilities except to each other. They each had a mission. And Steve was going to finish his.

“Please, don't make me do this,” he said at last, before the stand-off ended with the Winter Soldier launching himself at Steve with cold precision.

_Please just let me win without hurting him. If I’ve curried any favor with you, God, or really anyone who’s listening, please let him and all these other people live._

He doesn’t beg for his own life. He never has.

~  
“Done.” Natasha says as the computer finally works its magic, sending the last of the files out to the internet. 

She checks her phone for good measure, knowing that they couldn’t be certain of anything a SHIELD readout told them. Twitter and facebook are practically overloading with the news, “And it's trending.”

Fury shares something close to a smile with her and she is about to suggest that they go to help the others when the other council members drop, angry red holes burning in their chests from the pins they had been given. Natasha stares at her own chest to see her pin still there, “Unless you want two inch hole in your sternum, I'd put that gun down.”

There’s no way she’s not shooting him now. She keeps her gun held high, as does Fury. 

“That was armed the moment you pinned it on.” 

_Fuck._

Nick lowers his weapon before she does, and a glance from him means she’s putting her gun on the floor too, more angry that Fury didn’t just shoot Pierce than anything. 

~

Sam stays behind the divider, trying his best to even his breathing as he waits for Rumlow to round the corner.

“I'm on forty-one, headed towards the south-west stairwell,” Brock reports, just as Sam pulls a Natasha and jumps on his back. 

_I probably should have thought that through,_ Sam muses as Rumlow throws him off. The impact knocks the wind out of him and he coughs as Rumlow kneels down, knife at the ready.

“This is gonna hurt. There are no prisoners with HYDRA, just order. And order only comes through pain. You ready for yours?” Sam wonders if this is how all Nazi terrorists spoke, all drama and theater, but no substance. Sam never really understood the idea of villainous speeches and witty retorts. He was a soldier, and a para-rescue at that, so the most banter he got was a grunt from the guys he picked out of the field. He focused better in silence. 

“Man, shut the hell up,” he tries to quip through a closed throat and little breath. 

The knife glints in the sunlight as it comes down. 

~  
“One minute,” she says into the comms, trying not to think of the bullet headed her way if Steve didn’t finish the job. 

“What do you mean it’s not helping?” She’s trying not to yell at Thor. He’s trying. 

But Clint still isn’t breathing normally and blood still pours out of his nose like a fountain. 

“I am deeply sorry…”

Gunshots ring out on the comms and she’s distracted from Clint’s worsening condition as she tries to distinguish whose line it is by watching security feeds. She covers her mouth with her hand and Thor’s face is pinched as they watch the feed, tears falling silently as they wait, breath held. 

~  
“JARVIS, stats?”

“His BP is dropping. And his pulse is thready at best.”

Bruce hears the gunfire and then he’s shifting, changing, his muscles stretching and body contorting to expel the bullets as he screams in pain and anger.

~  
“Lieutenant, how much longer?”

She and Fury both grimace at the response.

“Sixty-five seconds to satellite link. Target reengaged. Lowering weapons array now.”

Her heart is in her throat and they’re both holding their breath. Watching the sky for signs that the tides would turn in their favor. 

The only sound on the horizon is the whirr of the weapons array and Pierce’s low laughter. 

~  
“Drop it! Drop it!” Steve ignores the pain in his shoulder from where the Soldier stabbed him. He’s wrestled the Soldier to the ground and they’re struggling for the chip, blood and fists. It’s clutched in Bucky’s flesh hand and Steve can’t help the tears that leak out of his eyes as he breaks that arm and pins the Soldier down with his weight, clutching his throat until he passes out.

Face crumpled with pain, he limps towards the targeting system. Hill’s voice is quiet, “One minute.”

His body doesn’t recognize it, when he hears the gunshot. He doesn’t recognize the warm liquid dribbling over his hand or that he even covered the exit wound or that he’s falling over, legs no longer supporting him as he breathes out and the pain finally hits with a second shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Russian word means Mission.
> 
> I'm going to try to post another chapter before I head out to Ontario to visit Niagara Falls.


	10. Tíu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Down to the wire, the team tries to stop the last helicarrier and Pierce. Thor makes a last-ditch attempt to save his injured teammates.

“Thirty seconds, Cap!” She tries not to look at him bleeding on the screen. Thor returns to Clint’s body… not his body. He can’t be dead.

Thor takes one look at Clint and scoops him up in his arms. “Where is the Man of Iron?”

“A security shed, off the shore 300 meters west.” He nods and hauls Barton into a position where he can use his hammer.

“None of your team shall die today, Agent Hill.” 

“Stand by,” Steve says from her headset. Thor awaits her reaction. She chokes out something like an affirmative and he’s gone in the blur of speed and a lightning strike.

She hears another shot from Steve’s line and wipes her cheeks before checking Charlie carrier’s feed, forcing herself to listen to the techspeak instead of the Captain’s grunts as he tries to insert the targeting blade with shaking hands wet with his own blood. 

“We've reached three thousand feet. Satellite coming online now.” _Fuck._

“Deploy algorithm.”

“Algorithm deployed.”

“We are go to targets.”

She sees her own name on the list of targets that flashes before her, but even worse she sees the names of people she worked with, people she cared about. “Targets saturation reached. All targets assigned.” _Fuck Fury for ever thinking this was something you could do. No one should have this much power._ She braces herself for a quick death.

“Fire when ready.” Steve lets out a pitiful whine on the comms and it gurgles with blood. 

“Firing in, three, two, one.”

There’s the click of something being locked into place, like plastic on metal. 

“Charlie locked,” Cap breathes out. 

She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. 

“Where are the targets? Where are the targets?” A smile breaks the desperation that had kept her jaw locked and her teeth ground against each other. She can’t help but let out a relieved laugh before she remembers that Cap is still on the helicarrier. 

~  
“Okay, Cap, get out of there.”

He grimaces, “Fire now.” He looks guiltily down at Bucky, still lying on the glass below him, arm broken and face bleeding. Pain twinges in his gut and he nearly doubles over. Steve’s never been gutshot. He’s seen it, heard the cries of men before the shock hits them, but never felt the cold running through his veins and the heat pouring out of his stomach. 

“But, Steve...”

“Do it! Do it now!” All he wants to do is go to Bucky. He hears the carriers open fire on each other and feels the weight of the helicarrier drop and stutter around them. He figures this is all the time he has left.

So he goes to him. 

~  
He’s angry. Inexplicably angry and all he wants to do is tear limbs from limbs and feel metal rip apart like butter under his hands. He scales the building and sees people that ring to him as _friends_ and a face that makes the ire already within him burn hotter. 

_Smash._

~  
“What a waste,” Pierce muses, looking out on the explosions as the helicarriers start to crash into each other, propelled by their own system failures.

“Are you still on the fence about Roger's chances?” Natasha asks coolly, anger burning like ice inside her. 

“Time to go, Councilwoman. This way, come on. You're gonna fly me out of here.”

Pierce puts a hand on the small of her back like he can guide her out of there, like she actually is the Councilwoman and not a trained assassin who could kill him in hundreds of different ways. She sees Nick’s lip curl in contempt, “You know, there was a time I would have taken a bullet for you.” Fury’s voice is unwavering as he says it. 

“You already did. You will again when...” They never find out when Fury will take a bullet for Pierce again, because there’s a giant green blur soaring through the window and Pierce is smashed against the wall, his sentence is cut off with a pained scream.

Natasha pulls off the pin at the same time Fury shoots Pierce, who is reaching for his own gun despite broken bones and blood leaking from a cut in his forehead. 

Fury kneels down next to his old friend turned enemy, who scorns him with his last words, “Hail, Hydra.”

Natasha digs a tired and barely-clothed Bruce out of the rubble. He mumbles, “Clint. Tony.”

“What?” 

“…Hurt.” She visibly takes a deep breath, earning her a questioning look from Fury, before getting to work. Natasha strips one of the councilmen and gives Bruce the pants and sport coat, marching towards the helicopter. 

“Where are they?” 

~  
Thor knows his friend doesn’t like to be used as a transportation service, but he calls Heimdall with a desperation that gets them an immediate entrance into the traveling space between realms and then even more quickly to Asgard. 

He just hopes it was quick enough.

~  
There’s a knife embedded in a chair that Sam had grabbed to shield himself and they’ve destroyed a few more previously unharmed hallway decorations since then. 

“You're out of your depth, kid,” Brock says, fists raised and bloody as he throws another punch, which Sam dodges. He sees the second helicarrier crashing into the Triskelion before Rumlow does. He starts running and Rumlow is caught up in the crash. 

“Please, tell me you got that chopper in the air!” He’s praying that he isn’t about to jump out of a building and splat. 

“Sam, where are you?” Romanoff says as she steers the chopper around the glass building, looking for a sign of him. 

“41st floor, north-west corner!” _Oh man. Oh man. He’s running, but the helicarrier is still hurtling through the Triskellion, sending smithereens of glass flying at him._

“We're on it, stay where you are.”

“Not an option!” Sam shouts as he’s pelting out the window at full speed. 

“41st floor! 41st!”

Fury gives him an indignant look, “It's not like they put the floor numbers on the outside of the building!”

“Hill, where's Clint now?” They had circled to the roof to find Maria with bloody hands and Clint absent. Stark was gone from the shed. 

“Thor took him and Tony to… I think he took them to a hospital? Or maybe Asgard. Somewhere to help them. So don’t worry about them until Thor gives us a reason to worry. Worry about the guy whose letting those carriers explode around him.”

Sam barely notices the words coming out of his mouth, “God fucking dammit, Steve!” 

~  
There’s rubble trapping Bucky’s legs and it’s all Steve can do to pull it off him, still bleeding heavily through his suit. But he couldn’t bear the resignation on Bucky’s face, how he just sat there with the pillar atop him, crushing him, as if it was something he deserved.

Anger flooded the Winter Soldier’s expression after Steve hauled him out of the death trap.

“You know me.”

Steve feels the powerful metal fist connect with his jaw. He spits out blood and can’t help but want to smile and cry because this is what he’s been waiting for. A reaction. But this is also not the reaction he wanted. His best friend isn’t just angry. He’s furiously pummeling Steve with imprecise but powerful punches. 

“No, I don't!” There’s confusion and hurt in his features and Steve tries to raise a hand to touch Bucky’s shoulder, to touch his cheek, only to have it pinned down with the metal hand, as if Steve’s touch would burn. 

“Bucky, you've known me your whole life.”

And there’s blood in his mouth again and this is nothing like the diner. He’s not aching and hard from the rough touch of his best friend’s fists. This is the sky burning around them and the plummet of the carrier falling apart and the kiss of blood and teeth on metal knuckles. 

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” 

“Shut up!” It hurts less this time. As if repeated exposure inured him to the pain of the touch and all he could feel was that _Bucky knows me_ and that was all that mattered. 

He lets his cowl fall off the rest of the way, meeting Bucky’s eyes, trying to get rid of the fear by willing the conviction in his own eyes into Bucky’s. 

There’s a hole in the glass. Steve lets his shield go because it’s just a safety blanket, and all he cares about now is Bucky because he has him in his grasp and that’s all that matters, “I'm not gonna fight you. You're my friend.”

He’s on the ground again, back braced uncomfortably against a crossbeam as Bucky’s broken arm acts as a strap across his chest. Bucky doesn’t seem to register the pain from his wounds, as if it were a scratch and not his bone snapped, as if the metal arm’s bicep wasn’t mangled by Steve’s grip. 

“You're my mission.” The growl resonates in Steve’s mind as _denial_ and his grin is feral when Bucky keeps punching him.

He swallows blood and tiny particulates of glass and thinks that if he wasn’t gonna die in a back alley, it had better be a blaze of glory with his best friend. 

“You're my mission!” There it is again. The mission and the fist, hitting Steve in the face. He doesn’t fight back.

“Then finish it.” He tries to tell himself that this isn’t Schmidt’s plane again. Bucky’s right here and the Soldier inside him is hesitating, fist held in the air like a broken promise. 

Steve closes his hand around the metal, ignoring the feeling of his own blood between the interlinked plates, holding it tightly so that he knows Bucky feels it, “’Cause I'm with you till the end of the line.”

And that’s what he says, but he knows it means, _I love you,_ just like _jerk_ meant _my love_ and _I had him on the ropes_ meant _Thank you for saving me. Thank you for being here for me._

There’s something clearing in Bucky’s eyes, words half-formed on lips that Steve had traced in charcoal and with his own. He can see the confusion in Bucky’s mind boiling down to the basics of their friendship, translating the meaning of the language they had formed in the back alleys and WPA-sponsored art classes of Brooklyn. 

Steve doesn’t get to see the recognition in Bucky’s eyes. The bottom falls out from underneath him and he’s in free fall, air rushing around him and he’s reaching out for the man above him even as he hits the water. It feels like concrete, pulverizing his bones and knocking the wind out of him. Everything fades to black and he’s finally reached the end of the line.

Somehow, he had never believed that there would be an end, not until that moment when the water fills his lungs and breathing it into his lungs feels like coming home.

~  
He only barely recognizes it when he jumps after the man. It isn’t something he consciously chose to do. It’s a reaction. And as he strains to see through the murky water, it’s second nature to search for the glint of gold reflecting the shards of sunlight piercing the water.

There it is.

It only takes half a hand movement to grab the navy collar before Steve Roger’s body descends into the Potomac, and he thinks nothing of it to drag him to shore. And despite his broken arm, it’s just _normal_ to smooth the hair out of the man’s face. 

The man’s eyes open just a sliver and he finally knows whose blue eyes have haunted his mind. 

“Buck?” 

He has no idea what possesses him to say, “Just close your eyes, punk.” Or why he presses a kiss to the dirty, bloodied forehead before leaving to an accompaniment of a helicopter’s rotor beating through the air.

The name Steve Rogers is no longer conflated with _mission_ but with _friend._

~  
Steve hears music from a phone and looks over to see an album cover reading “Marvin Gaye,” and “Trouble Man,” on the screen of the sleek black phone. A few feet over, Sam is reading something on a sheer piece of lightweight glass that shines with gold letters that dissipate when he touches the screen.

With a cough, Steve manages, “On your left.”

“Hello, Sleeping Beauty,” Sam says with a wry grin, putting the tablet down on an ornate side table. This isn’t a hospital, from what he can tell. Nor is it Earth, unless he was frozen again and Sam joined him in cryo. 

“Sorry about the musical quality. Asgard doesn’t exactly have iPod jacks.” _Ah._

“Oh. So that’s why everything is so… Ritzy.” Steve isn’t in a hospital bed so much as a giant—and when he says giant, he means bigger than a California King and most bathrooms he’s been in—marshmallow. Well, it’s still a bed, but it’s softer even than his bed at home, and that already felt like a cloud of too-soft. Though, he really didn’t mind this, the way his body ached.

“You should only be out of commission for another few days. The Asgardian doctors worked their healing magic on you, and it seemed to amplify what the serum was already doing.”

“Clint?”

“His face is almost back to normal, and they repaired everything else. The Asgardians even made him new fancy hearing aids since the Soldier busted his. Tony’s alright too, he should be able to walk by the time you’re healed up.”

“Able to walk?” Steve feels like he missed something big when he was fighting Bucky. But then again, the comms were all too quiet excepting Hill. They hadn’t wanted to distract him, it seemed. 

“His suit tore him up real bad on impact, dug right through his leg, gave him a few more minor lacerations.”

“Everyone else?”

“Fine. Though I think Hill wants to kill all of us for scaring her. And Fury wants to kill you for dropping the shield, since no one’s exactly willing to dredge the Potomac for a terrorist organization. Lucky for you, he and Hill left Asgard before you woke up, so you’ll be saved from any lectures.”

Steve grunts and tries to sit up, giving up after a moment to speak, “Great. Anyone else want to kill or lecture me?”

“Well, apparently not the Winter Soldier, considering the fact that we all saw him rescue you like a blushing half-drowned damsel,” Natasha says from the doorway. Steve hadn’t even heard her approach, but he throws her as much of a smile as he can manage anyways—despite her damsel comment—because he _is_ happy to see her, even if the rest of him isn’t feeling that happy. 

“Glad to know I didn’t just hallucinate that.”

“Nope. Your boy jumped out right after you and plucked you out of the water. Then caressed your face,” Tony points out from a gilded wheeled chair, rolling in past Natasha, who continues to lean against the door jam, head tilted curiously. 

He wasn’t sure how to respond to that; he had felt the rough hand pushing the hair out of his face, and chapped lips against his forehead. But it was easier to pretend he had just saved Steve on reaction, without even acknowledging whatever was between them. The rescue was definitive. All the other feelings that the tenderness Bucky or the Winter Soldier showed him implied—those weren’t definitive. He couldn’t count on that. He couldn’t even interpret what it meant, since Bucky hadn’t stuck around to talk. 

Sam put a hand on his leg before getting up, “You don’t have to talk about it yet, man. As for me, I’ve been playing babysitter too long. I’m going to go explore.” 

“I haven’t found Valhalla yet,” Tony shouts as Sam passes Natasha.

She scoffs, “You kind of have to die first to get there, genius.”

“Negotiable.” 

Steve’s laugh surprises him, bubbling out of his throat with a smile and causing Nat and Tony to turn their heads sharply.

“What?”

“I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you really laugh…” Tony says, all his normal sarcasm and snark gone from his tone, obfuscated by genuine surprise. 

Clint walks in and Steve’s jaw drops, “Did we just break the ice?” He puns, as if he weren’t just walking in on the conversation and as if his nose wasn’t swollen and lumpy and his cheeks weren’t bruised purple and puffy. 

“Oh my god, Clint.” 

And that’s all he can really say, as Clint shrugs and takes up Sam’s seat.

“Don’t worry. They managed to put all my brains and blood back in. Even saved the nose! It should be fine in a day or two thanks to their medical stuff.”

“Speaking of their medical stuff: they won’t let me look at any of their technology,” Tony grumbles, “They have hoverchairs and I have a glorified wheelchair! They have solutions to problems that kill millions of people on earth and I can’t even get a looksee.” 

Clint sighs, “And you and I both know they could fix my hearing or even replicate Steve’s serum if they wanted to, but that’s not why we’re here. They brought me back from the brink. That’s all I’m asking for. That and coffee when we get home. That is one thing they do not have here.”

“Come on, Barton!”

“No buts. If you want to make so many medical advances, get a degree and do it yourself. I’m not messing with earth’s development.”

“Maybe I will,” Tony pouts before wheeling away. 

Clint bends down to give Steve an almost hug, “How are you doing, man?”

“Still a little bit gutshot, you?”

“Still a little bit the bones in my face almost going into my brain.”

“Ah…” They’re quiet for a moment, contemplating each other’s injuries, “So what was that all about? With you and Tony?”

“Tony wants to… I don’t know. Kickstart earth’s development with this stuff? But the only organization I thought could handle that sort of power is gone because it was infiltrated by Nazi terrorists. Let’s be real here, I don’t think _anyone_ should have the power housed here, much less Tony Stark, hell, much less me! Why do you think I’m still wearing hearing aids?”

The room is quiet for a moment. Steve finally speaks up after taking a deep breath, “You know, before the serum I was pretty much deaf in one ear. Even though I know it’s a tactical disadvantage, I kind of get it. Why you wouldn’t want them to take it away,” Clint looks up from where he had been staring at his shoes, something like hope in his eyes that were still a little too closed from swelling, “Though I’m sure earth’s development is of high import, as well,” He adds. 

Natasha huffs, but doesn’t sound scornful, “You miss being half-deaf?”

“No, I just… I don’t even know how to describe it. Bucky still, even after the serum, he’d always talk real clear-like and just a touch too loud into one ear and then cuss me out on the other side for being a fool about whatever dumb thing I’d just done. The first time I actually _heard_ him doing it… It felt like it changed who I was with Bucky, like it changed how I interacted with the world. Same with my color-blindness. I had never even seen red or blood before, not really, and once olive uniforms started marching about, everything looked the same… and I could never paint the greens in Bucky’s eyes right, it was too gray and dark, so I never wasted the money on paint. But then I could see right and everything was different.” He stops and looks and Clint, hoping that his explanation hadn’t just sounded like him being an asshole. Clint was listening raptly, and Steve continued, “While I wouldn’t want to be sick again, I lived most of my life working around my problems. I created a life around the way I was, and for that to be uprooted? It’s scary, no matter how much good comes of it.”

Clint nods and Steve hopes that he hadn’t overstepped his bounds. He wasn’t the same guy he was, and even he forgot sometimes what it was like to have to work and live around a disability. 

Nat puts a hand on Clint’s shoulder and squeezes, finally entering the room and placing a kiss on Steve’s cheek before leaving the same way she came. 

“They don’t tell you that in the history books. Not that I really ever read them, but, you know, I heard about them.” Only then did it strike Steve how little he knew about his teammates; he knew that Barton’s upbringing had something to do with the circus, which explained the lack of history books, but not much else. 

“I’m not even sure it’s on the list at the Smithsonian,” He muses, instead of going down the other rabbithole, “They like to advertise some stuff, like the scarlet fever or the heart arrhythmia or asthma, especially my weight and height. For whatever reason, they leave that out.”

“Most people below level 8 don’t know I’m deaf. It’s more of a safety thing, but, still. I get it. People not knowing.”

“How much hearing did you lose?” Something he did know was that it happened on a mission, mostly because he was briefed about a lot of things once he reached level eight. He hadn’t even known Clint was deaf the first time they had worked together, against the Chitauri. 

“Something like eighty percent.”

Steve doesn’t say he’s sorry, simply nodding. Yes, Barton was lucky to have technology to help him (and the means to get it), but that didn’t make it any less crappy.

“I think I’m going to go and make sure Tony doesn’t do anything stupid,” Clint says after a while, coughing to dispel the silence. Steve nods and gives him a half-wave before letting out his breath and lying back down the moment Clint leaves the room, trying to find a position that didn’t make his abdominal muscles scream in agony. Sitting up had been a lot of effort.

“It is not healthy to pretend wellness for the sake of others.”

And, of course, he’s already got another visitor. Thor. He continues lying down, since he had only just found a decent position. 

“Guess I shouldn’t have expected to be left alone,” He doesn’t mean it to come out as harsh as it does. But he wants to sleep. And eat. Thor is carrying a tray of simple fare—bread, soup, some sort of fruit—that smells like heaven, so Steve amends his statement, “Not that I mind, especially if you come bearing food.” He smiles and Thor does too, ease returned to their rapport as he passes over the tray. Steve sits up again with a groan. 

“You need to replenish your strength; Banner tells me that you heal much more quickly with proper nutrition to maintain your metabolism.”

“Should I be expecting a visit from him as well? I already got the rest of the gang.”

“Alas, I fear he is recovering from his latest change.”

“Physically?” Steve asks.

“Mentally,” Bruce says from the doorway. Apparently, he _was_ going to get a visit the whole team today. 

He tries not to sound callous, “Do anything regrettable?”

“Not really. Protected Tony from some stray Hydra operatives. Killed Pierce, kept Natasha and Fury out of trouble.”

Steve chews on the inside of his cheek and furrows his brow, remembering something, “What happened to Stern?” He asks Thor. 

Bruce looks down and starts laughing. Thor explains, “Heimdall retrieved your entire group after you fell, including the Senator.”

“That’s why Fury and Hill left so early,” Bruce adds, pulling out a pocket knife and cutting the fruit that Steve had been holding in his hand with no idea how to eat it. Cutting the thing revealed that it had segments like an orange despite its purple hue and eggshell-like skin. The taste reminded him of raisins. 

“I believe he is a changed man and will do well for your people now.” _If Fury doesn’t make his life a living hell first._ Though, he could be an asset if he really was turned by Thor’s kind brand of persuasion, but then again, he hadn’t been Hydra until after the charity gala-- _Was that really only a week ago?_ —which meant he could be easily manipulated.

“How so?” He wondered how Thor could get the man to join their side, not that it was a political one, but a side of a war. 

“I told him the story of my brother and Svaðilfari.”

“Who?”

“You don’t want to know,” Bruce says quickly, but he’s soon drowned out by Thor telling them the story of how Loki mothered the eight-legged horse Sleipnir after turning into a mare to distract the stallion, and, by proxy, its owner. 

After the description gets too vivid Steve realizes exactly how changed Senator Stern must be after such a tale.

Bruce is quiet throughout the story’s telling. Steve tries to give Thor his utmost attention, but he can’t help but notice the redness and dark circles lining Bruce’s eyes, as well as the tired slump of his posture. After the Battle of New York, Steve hadn’t stuck around long enough to see the effects of Banner’s change. They didn’t seem good. 

But however they made Bruce feel, clearly they were not something that could be healed by Asgardian medicine.

Steve thinks back to the violence with which Bucky reacted to him, screaming that he didn’t know Steve, and can’t help but think the same of Bucky’s trauma.

~  
This time he eats. Not well, but he steals some food and makes sure he drinks. He doesn’t remember why he does this, or why he knows that the last time he did reconnaissance he didn’t. 

Getting to Russia on a commercial flight was harder than the programming said it would be, and he suspected that he hadn’t been updated on flight protocols. He ended up in a cargo flight, sneaking onto the flight as it taxied down the runway and hiding between wooden boxes of medical equipment, everything from x-rays to EKGs, according to the packaging. 

Security was much less heavy on the other end, upon touchdown in Moscow. He stole a bright orange air control vest and blended in seamlessly in the crowded airport, leaving quietly after stealing a hoodie from an airport store. 

The person he was trying to find—he remembers the name Zharkov—is not the aging scientist he had known, but his son. He leaves soon after he sees the man kiss his wife and child in turn with a smile on his youthful face. 

The Winter Soldier remembers a few more names, but something in him can’t let go of the dusky light hitting gold through the grey water of the Potomac and his attachment to a man who is at once big and strong and small and frail, ivory-olive and red-white-blue. After only a day in Russia he takes trains and buses through Europe towards France so that he can return via cargo ship to the very city he had left ruined not a week before.

Something in him tugs at him, reminding him to see France— _once it’s not torn apart by war,_ his mind says—but he has the feeling there was supposed to be someone else with him to visit _les musées de Paris et les champs de Provence._

He eats in DC; he pickpockets a man wearing a Rolex and buys burgers; he has almost no idea why he wanted them. He watches and waits, combing the newspapers and the streets for any sign of Steve Rogers. 

Two days after his arrival in the U.S., he strikes gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter # is Old Norse for ten  
> The french means 'the museums of paris and the fields of Provence'
> 
> I think that's it.
> 
> Oh, and I'm not a medical expert; please ignore any inaccuracies w/ injuries.
> 
> And all the disability stuff sort of comes from experience? I've never had a sense of smell and the doctors never figured out why (that's why I try to include that as a sensation in writing and mostly fail because I don't know how anything smells). obviously it's nothing as severe or impairing as deafness or even colorblindness but it's a part of me and that's how I feel about it and how other people I know have described their disabilities (particularly colorblindness)


	11. Undici

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Sam search for Bucky, who seems to be better at finding them than they are at finding him.

Steve arrives in DC with Sam, feeling the loss of the rest of the Avengers by his side as Heimdall transported the others to New York, where Stark was excited to show them the whole floors he had made for each of them—which Steve found to be just this side of overwhelming for him. However, Steve couldn’t help but offer to give Sam a hand packing up his life for one on the road, as Steve was the reason he was leaving what normalcy he had made for himself in the quaint white house and the rooms of the local VA.

The moment Steve had announced his intention to cross the Bifrost and ask Heimdall where in the universe Bucky Barnes was, the conversation had gone pretty simply, Sam asking, “You’re going after him.”

Steve replying with: “You don’t have to come with me,” referring more to crossing the rainbow bridge than to chasing after his amnesiac assassin best friend.

Sam, in lieu of his usual warm chuckle, putting a hand on Steve’s shoulder and saying seriously, “I know. When do we start?”

And that had been that.

However, Heimdall’s results weren’t as exacting as Steve had hoped. Being that they were nonexistent, “Bucky Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, James Barnes, he is not there, not fully no matter what iteration of his name you give me. And the thread of the Winter Soldier is even more tenuous. I fear you will have to find him through Midgardian means.”

So, DC it was. Last known location and all that. Tony—well, probably his AI, JARVIS—was working on the technology angle, knowing that the Winter Soldier couldn’t possibly hide his tracks so well. After helping Sam pack up his belongings, which were still relatively scant, Steve made his way to the veritable disaster scene which was the edge of the Potomac, just off where the half-ruined Triskelion still stood, fragmented and glittering in the midday sun with jagged edges of glass and metal.

There wasn’t much. Any tracks had been washed away by the rain that had fallen heavy on the city a few days after. Steve still didn’t know where his shield was.

He almost didn’t care, even if Tony said that he was already paying people to find it, along with adopting stray SHIELD agents into his company under Maria Hill, calling it the ‘privatization of world peace.’

Only Tony Stark would have a head big enough to think he could buy world peace. And a heart big enough to try, loathe as Steve was to admit that Tony wasn’t just the egotistical playboy he tried to play himself off as. 

With a sigh, Steve resigned himself to having to wait for Tony’s tech angle or one of Natasha’s contacts, making the hike back up to the parking garage where Sam was trying to park the—rented, not stolen—van. He had pawned off his mental list of stolen cars and owners that he wanted to repay to Clint, who was more than happy to take Stark’s checkbook and make a few calls if it meant he could help without moving from the nest he made in the rafters of his rooms. 

Thor, surprisingly, hadn’t stayed in Asgard, preferring instead to catch back up with his girl, Jane. Steve mentally corrected himself, knowing that most people didn’t like to be referred to as someone else’s, especially people with as many college degrees as Jane Foster. Having met Selvig and heard his and Thor’s tales about her, Steve could imagine why Thor would want to get back to someone like her so quickly.

He could very well sympathize.

When he got back to the truck, Sam was just walking back, holding two ice coffees with a grin beneath his sunglasses. Steve had learned that everyone was happier after spending money on sugary coffee, Steve not being exempt from that himself, “I’m gonna miss the coffee places here.”

Steve shrugged in response, “Coffee in New York isn’t so bad. There’s a good place in Times Square.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ve just been stationary long enough I got used to it.”

He pursed his lips sympathetically and took the proffered coffee as Sam unlocked the van, “You really don’t have to help—” Steve stopped short.

The shield was in the passenger seat, not gleaming, but cleaner than the Potomac would have left it. It needed a serious buffing and a repaint, but it was there regardless. 

He turned to Sam, baffled expression asking his question for him. Sam put up his hand, mouth still half around his straw, “Don’t look at me, man.”

Steve doesn’t pick it up reverently, as Sam seems to expect, but he whips around, looking for Bucky. Because who else would leave him his shield? Who else would have found it and broken into their van to give it to him?

The move reminded him of Natasha more than anything.

Steve prowled around the surrounding blocks, scaling fire escapes to get onto the rooftops and finding nothing.

Sam helped, of course, talking to people and asking if they had seen anyone fitting Bucky’s description. But he called Steve down once the sun set and drove them back to his house, now much less homey.

“We’ll crash here tonight. Maybe your boy will do a cameo,” Someone must have told Sam about Queens, “But you need your rest.”

“I can rest once I find him,” Steve practically growled, pacing the guest room, which was bare and desolate since emptying it earlier that day of everything but the daybed.

Sam clamped a hand over his shoulder and it was all Steve could do to not tear himself from the touch, but he knew that might send Sam reeling into the wall or break his hand and he had better control over himself than that. At least he thought he did.

He let his breathing even out as Sam forced him to lock eyes with him, dark eyes glinting in the blue light filtering in from the kitchen, “You are not going to rest once you find him because you will not find him if you run yourself into the ground. And then you really won’t rest once you find him because you’ll worry yourself to death over him. You won’t leave his side. You’ll let yourself go ragged from sleep deprivation before you let yourself admit that you can’t fix things overnight.”

Steve breathed in harshly, ready with a half-hearted argument, when Sam interrupted him, hand moving from his shoulder to pat his cheek in a move that would be patronizing if it weren’t filled with so much empathy. Sam knew what he was talking about, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint, Rogers.”

So, Steve nods, choking back the tightness in his throat and closing the door with a grateful, “G’night, Sam.”

He startled awake many times in the night, at the slightest of sounds. None of them were the telltale presence of the Winter Soldier or Bucky crouched in the corner.

Steve tried not to let himself feel disappointed at that. 

~  
His thinking cleared in his two days in the U.S., the historical sites reminding him of cramped public classrooms and paying more attention to the boy in front of him than the lesson, worried that the teacher would express her less-than-favorable opinion of the Irish again and he would have to pull Steve out of a fight he couldn’t win with fists or wit.

But his memories were scattered and serrated, cutting on the way in and out, as if just remembering those hazy ivory days would pierce his skull, giving him a headache like no other and making him think of the olive and bloodstains and screaming, erased by black leather and pressure in his ears and biting down on his screams.

It was easier to be the Winter Soldier; that was for sure.

He still hadn’t found Rogers. But he knew there was something of his still in DC. So he walked the banks of the Potomac and waded in, seemingly for no reason, cold water up to his thighs, then his neck, then submerged, eyes open and searching.

He searched for the shield like he was looking for a body. That he knew how to do.

What to do once he had it, stripping his shirt off to clean it as if his shirt wasn’t covered in the same river filth. As if the shield were something precious.

The shield wasn’t cast in the creamy sepia tones of what he inexplicably knew as _before_ , however it was ever too prevalent in army khaki of dress greens and the navy of his jacket wrapped tight around him and his jaw clenched as Steve would beckon him over, tending to the cuts he could see, chiding when he saw Bucky strip down and saw the bruises on his knees from kneeling for hours in his sniper’s nest. _We should get the SSR to commission you a pair of knee pads. You’re going to be one of those old men who can feel a storm coming in his knees by thirty at this rate._

Bucky didn’t mention that he already could, the warm ache of swelling telling him before the train that it was going to snow up in those mountains. He didn’t warn them because they were this close to Zola, and, yes, Bucky had wanted to get him. But he had thought that maybe, just maybe, Steve would stop his crusade if they got the scientist.

Maybe he’d let them go home, where Bucky could hide the dark part of him that liked killing, tamping it down with drink and dames. Where Bucky could be something other than Steve’s loyal killer dog. Where he could marry a girl and try to forget the shoulders, broad and slim, that had haunted his fantasies for too many years to count. 

He didn’t get the chance, but he did forget.

But never for long enough. The agony wasn’t forgetting, but remembering, needles of memory entering then exploding on impact like incendiaries, sending spasms of pain through his mind as he tried to seduce world leaders, sending him howling to the moon as he taught little girls to kill.

Leaving him breathless and relieved when the cold came.

The worst part was remembering everything backwards, after they would try a new memory treatment and he’d find himself killing scientists and politicians, everyone in the Red Room who had organized his torment. And then going back, docile as a lamb once he remembered Steve. Once he looked for him and found nothing but old film reels and the recording of his voice as he went down.

Anything was better than remembering at that point. So he went back and let them poke around in his brain with knives and needles and let the bliss of forgetting wash over him.

Then he was asleep and it was 2014 and Steve was alive. 

Everything exists in his brain in snippets of pain, and it’s all he can do to thread them together through sheer will. It’s everything he can do, on his second day of surveillance of Sam Wilson’s house, when he sees Steve Rogers, to not kill him.

He only wishes it was the mission that made his hand clench and trigger finger itch. His hands tug at the backpack on his back, seams stretched uncomfortably around the girth of the shield. Wryly, he thinks Steve might need it if he can’t restrain himself. 

He leaves it in their van and finds a bus back to New York. 

The memories of that bull-headed, too-good man stuck in that weak body don’t make him angry. Just the broad shoulders and a man who was looking for him, not for Bucky’s sake but for his own.

When he arrives in New York, however, thoughts of Brooklyn don’t make his head ache so much. He catches the corners of his mouth lifting as the clouds linger, gray and ominous, when he thinks of rainy days and charcoal on delicate hands and a pink tongue sticking out in concentration.

He wonders if Steve still draws and tries not to dwell on the idea.

~  
They waste another day in DC before Tony calls them, “Barnes is in New York. Spotted by a camera in the bus station. Get up here.”

Sam gives him his patented ‘I told you so’ look, and Steve ignores it in favor of grabbing his bag and throwing it in the van with a pointed glare, “Which bus station?”

“Where else but Brooklyn, Star-Spangled Man? I’ll text you the details. Or, have Jarvis text you the details. Because really, who has the time for all that typing?”

The line goes silent for a moment, nothing but the sound of breath before Tony summons up a, “You’ll be okay, Cap. You’ll find him.”

Steve gulps down something sour that rises in his throat as he hangs up with a, “Thanks, Stark.”

He stares at the phone. He could call Banner, or—he looks up at Sam, who wears an expression of concern. Chewing at the inside of his cheek, it takes Steve a moment to ask, “You read the file, right?”

Sam nods, and Steve goes on at his cue, speaking slowly to collect his thoughts, “Why do you think he’s not going on a killing spree of all the scientists and politicians who hurt him, like in ’07?” Sam purses his lips and answers just as slowly, pausing over every word as if his response were breaking some sort of counseling rule.

“I’m not trying to give you false hope, man, but maybe he knows there’s something for him now?”

Steve raises an eyebrow, and Sam explains further, “Like, you were dead in 2007. Or considered dead. Either way he had nothing. Now he has something tangible of what he used to be.” Steve opened his mouth to interrupt, to ask why he wouldn’t just come back to Steve if that was the case, but Sam held up a finger to quiet him and went on, “That doesn’t mean he’s ready to start rebuilding, not necessarily, but maybe he’s more concerned with figuring out who he used to be than killing people in an organization that’s already crumbling.”

Steve hangs his head and tries to fight back the tightening in his throat, “I just—for a minute there, back in Queens, he was Bucky, you know? And then a word of Russian and he’s a weapon again, whether he’s fighting like Bucky or the Winter Soldier, he’s not a person. And then he pulls me out of the Potomac, gives me back my shield, but he won’t. He doesn’t want to talk to me? I don’t know. I’m just—”

Soothingly, Sam puts a hand on his shoulder, “You’ve been through hell too, with this. But whatever he’s doing right now? It’s for him. To help him get his bearings. Maybe you should do the same before you try to pull him back into your orbit.” Steve looks at him, brows furrowed and gaze curious. Sam sighs and looks like he regrets whatever he just said.

“My orbit?” 

“I didn’t mean to put it that way,” Sam defends, but explains himself nonetheless after Steve tries to wipe the hurt from his features and fails, “But you’ve got this pull that makes people want to be better, not for themselves, but for you. You have to know the effect you have on people, especially if he comes back, because you’re going to have to be aware of everything you do. The things that would help you might not be good for him and the things that he does for himself may hurt you and that’s just recovery. Is how it is.”

Steve didn’t really know how to respond to that. They were silent for most of the drive, listening to a jazz station, until the radio broke out into static and they eventually had to shut off the radio. 

“What do I have to do? To get better?”

~  
“Where are you going?” Tony can’t help but ask after Natasha barges into his lab and takes enough tech that he’s fairly certain she’s just as good with the stuff as he is. 

“I’m missing pieces. I need to go find them.”

“Is this about what you were telling Rogers about after your big showdown with the Soldier on the bridge?”

Natasha narrows her eyes and doesn’t answer and Tony sighs, “Do I have to disappoint Legolas or have you already told him?”

She gives him an unreadable quirk of her eyebrows that leads Stark to believe that she hasn’t told anyone. He presses his hand to the headache he can already feel developing behind his temples, “Are you going to help Rogers with his manhunt or…”

Natasha looks the most bashful he’s seen her, and even then it’s more of a passing expression, “This is for me. It might help James as well.”

“Who?”

The expression on her face is akin to someone who just saw a ghost, and it’s not an expression he likes to see on the features of one of the deadliest people he’s ever met. Her voice is quiet, “I have to go.”

He doesn’t press. In fifteen minutes he has Jarvis put him on the intercom to Clint’s room, “She’s gone.”

Clint’s ungainly snort resonates over the speakers in his lab, “Figures.”

~  
They make good time to New York, but the bus station is as empty of any sign of Bucky as they thought it would be. When Sam suggests going over to Stark’s, Steve capitulates, unwilling to look for Bucky if he doesn’t want to be found, especially after Sam had filled him in on some of his experiences with veterans.

Even those with homes to go back to often found themselves running from too-soft beds and love they didn’t feel they deserved after things they had seen and done. Regardless, he’d be damned if he didn’t try to keep an eye on his best friend with all of the resources Stark had at his disposal.

Steve drops his pack by the door of an immense apartment—well, floor—that Stark had decked out in vintage tones of warm wood and boxes of stuff from his apartment in DC that had somehow found their way to Stark Tower. Steve didn’t have the heart to tell Tony that most of the stuff in those boxes was picked out by someone from SHIELD and intentionally arranged for him in that apartment. 

Sam had taken a look at some of the stuff and taken it to his own bare floor, saying that he had always wanted the disposable income to buy a bunch of old gadgets and useless but pretty books and furnish his apartment with them. 

Steve didn’t think his grateful smile ever really covered how much he valued the little things that Sam did, but thanking him involved words too weak to push past the lump in his throat, so he stayed quiet and hoped that Sam understood.

When Sam decided that they were going to go antiquing around Brooklyn—which had become gentrified enough to sport such stores—‘to find the real shit,’ Steve had clapped a hand on his shoulder which had led to a long-held hug that had them both coughing and slapping each other on the back afterwards. Given the similar wetness in Sam’s eyes, Steve thought that he wasn’t the only one who needed that.

Steve meets Sam on the main floor in his baseball cap and navy jacket to Clint’s sniggers. 

“What?” 

“Do you know anything about disguises? Or like, subtlety?”

“Says the guy with a potato nose,” Sam points out, wearing a plain white shirt and Dockers. Pointedly not wearing a hoodie or jeans, because New York cops were still not famous for being kind to black men dressed like that, holding cellphones or the like, as Steve had learned from his habit of reading the deepest pages of the newspapers (and now, online newspapers) since his youth.

“At least put on a less skin-tight shirt and lose the hat,” Clint admonishes, pulling off the offending hat and tossing it aside. This leads to them chasing Steve up a few flights of stairs to his rooms and digging through his meager wardrobe—also transported from DC without his knowledge—until they find something suitable.

“Why are all your shirts so tailored?” Clint asks, holding up a navy shirt that tapered in at the waist and examining the seams with a pinched expression. Steve had no idea. He hadn’t bought most of his clothes, they had come with the apartment SHIELD had given him.

Sam finally manages to find a long-sleeved gray shirt that is loose enough to hide the musculature that he sported due to the serum and Clint goes to Natasha’s floor to rifle through some of the covert gear she had left behind. He came back with a few bits of shiny metal and some waxy papers clutched in his hands.

“Smart,” Sam says, looking at the metal—which Steve now realized were fake piercings—and the papers, which were tribal-style fake tattoos. Before Steve could back away, Clint had already grabbed his lip and clipped on a ring. 

“Ow,” he whines, tonguing at the metal where it pinched his mouth. It wasn’t the most comfortable feeling.

“Get over it,” Sam chides, “Captain America would never have tattoos or piercings. No one will recognize you with these on.”

Clint snorts as he finishes with Steve’s nose and ears; Sam starts applying the tattoos to Steve’s arms, under the archer’s instructions, pushing up the sleeves of the shirt, “Yeah, and these look a damn sight better than the stupid hat.”

Poorly, Steve tries to conceal his frown. He liked that hat; it was one of the few things he had bought himself after people started recognizing him. Clint notices and corrects himself, “It’s a nice hat. But maybe wear it to a ball game, not as a disguise.” 

He hadn’t meant to make Clint feel bad, especially since Clint was doing this to help him—and since he had nearly died helping him at the Triskelion—so Steve makes more of an effort to keep his emotions from making such a plain appearance on his face. It works well enough and they leave the tower with a ‘Stay out of trouble,’ from Clint and a ‘Since you are now employees of Stark Industries, your bank account balances have gone up significantly,’ from Jarvis, who was probably passing along the message from Tony. 

In the elevator, Sam whistles as he grabs his phone to check his online banking, “What do you want to bet I can find something at this antique store that will make even Stark’s eyebrows meet his hairline.”

“Ten dollars says I outspend you,” Steve wagers, knowing that he could very easily do it if he wanted to; while he would always be a product of the Great Depression, that didn’t mean he couldn’t buy something for no good reason, even if it made the back of his neck prickle uncomfortably.

“Deal,” Sam says.

Starting off with a bang, Sam buys a Chippendale style secretary desk for a few thousand, wiggling his eyebrows, “Beat that, Hoover flag.”

Steve goes down a block to a shop that had caught his eye while Sam deals with the shipping on his desk, and comes back riding a Ducati. 

“Seriously?” Sam asks, clambering on the back of the motorbike as Steve hands him a helmet, “No, seriously, dude, how much did this cost?”

“You don’t want to know,” Steve says, but hands Sam the receipt anyways before Sam’s swearing is muffled by the revving of the engine and the papers flying.

Laughing with exhilaration, for once forgetting their woes, the two friends don’t notice the narrowed eyes trailing them from a nearby rooftop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh yeah sorry for not updating this in forever and sorry it's not super angsty I promise there will be more angst later
> 
> Undici is eleven in Italian. Ducati (fancy Italian motorcycle brand that my mom loves) was the only language-y link I had in here so I'll be repeating languages I guess.
> 
> Also I wrote another stucky series called Leaves of Grass so go check it out: http://archiveofourown.org/series/138219


	12. Дванадцять

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another member of the team leaves. Another finds their way. Sam makes Steve smile. Someone from her past makes Natasha smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY because I took so long to post I'm going to do a summary of the story for y'all b/c I know how annoying it is to get a notification for a fic and have no idea what happened in that fic so: Overall this is a rewrite of Cap 2 plus massive superhero fatigue of all the Avengers getting in on the action. We completed the Cap 2 storyline and are now sort of doing our own thing. Thor went back to England to chill with Jane, Natasha left without telling Clint/most of the team, and the Winter Soldier has been getting most of his memories back, not just having "lucid" episodes like he was earlier in the fic, but forming an image of himself as a person and gaining back important aspects of personhood, like agency over his emotions/memories. In the last chapter Steve and Sam went out to spend some of Tony's money because of silliness. They sort of gave Steve a little undercover makeover complete with false tattoos and piercings, and Steve bought a Ducati (e.g. beautiful powerful italian motorcycle), beating Sam at spending and generally being smiley and cute and carefree because he's realizing that he has a lot of issues to get through on his own (same as Bucky) before he can really help care for his friend. This picks off right after, but then fast forwards a week.

Sam and Steve stop to get burgers on their way back from their shopping adventure, but Steve’s phone rings the moment they sit down and start to dig in. Steve sighs, putting down his burger and swiping his thumb across the screen to answer, “Hello?” 

“Gotta say, unnecessary spending is a good look on you, Rogers. So are the tats. Scrumptious, really.”

“I’m sorry, did you have something useful to say? Other than violating my privacy?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. What did I even call him for?” Steve could tell Tony was talking at his AI, who answered something indistinguishable through the phone, probably due to a security measure.

“Right! Right! No news on your boyfriend but Bruce wanted to say goodbye before he left.”

“He’s leaving?”

“Booked a flight to Wakanda for a few hours from now. At least this time he’s taking my funding.”

Steve nods and starts packing up the food, “We’ll be right there.” Sam’s already packed up his own food and grabs a plastic bag from where they ordered, for the food, before putting it in one of the hard saddlebags on the bike.

“First Natasha and Thor, now Banner? It seems like your dream team is breaking up pretty quickly,” Sam comments after Steve parks the bike in the Tower’s garage. He shrugs and tries not to feel hurt by them leaving. But they each had their own shit to deal with, Steve included. They had every reason to leave, for their own sakes.

He says as much to Sam, who chuckles, “Still feels like a knife to the gut, though, right?”

“A little,” Steve agrees, the displeasure at feeling so selfish clear from his expression.

“You are allowed to think of yourself; just know that doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you a person with regular thoughts and feelings. When you leave, it’s not much different, there’s guilt on that side of the fence too.”

“You left?”

“After Riley, I didn’t stay on with the rest of them.”

“I guess I left after Bucky too. Though I hadn’t… I didn’t think it was leaving until I hit the ice and realized who I was leaving behind.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many times I thought about taking the wings up and not coming back down until,” He swallows past something, and Steve feels the same lump form in the back of his throat, “Yeah. It was too much. But they took the wings away and I—I couldn’t stand the idea of our buddies losing both of us. Or staying there to lose someone else.”

Steve wishes he had had that kind of strength, then maybe he could have found Bucky before he became the Winter Soldier.

 _But, for better or for worse, we’re both here now. So I’m going to make the most of it._

They remain silent for the elevator ride up to Clint’s floor—which had become the unofficial common room, given Tony had texted them to meet Bruce there and that he and Sam had even met there before their little shopping trip, hence Clint’s participation in Steve’s being dressed like a doll.

“Nice art,” Bruce points out, chuckling at the faux tattoos still decorating Steve’s forearms. 

Shrugging, he replies, “You heading out?”

Banner nods, “I need a break… And I’ve got a friend who’s got some promising research for me. But if you find your friend needs help, or you need someone to talk to, I won’t be off the grid. You can always call me; Tony has the number.” 

Steve holds out his hand to shake and is surprised when Banner pulls him into a brief one-armed hug, saying, “Take care of yourself,” And this is the sort of farewell he had expected—had wanted—from Natasha, but it’s more than enough that Bruce did so instead. 

The doctor and Sam shake hands with a nod of mutual respect. Another wave and a smile that doesn’t reach brown eyes and he’s gone. 

As if sensing the somber mood, Clint makes a suggestion that they can all agree with, “Take out?”

~  
It short circuits his brain a little, to see Steve so well-blended in with his environment. Before, he had stuck out like a sore thumb, tracing Bucky’s long-faded steps like a lost puppy as Bucky looked on from above—or from plain sight, often. 

At this point he wasn’t so much seeking parts of his past as they were hurtling at him at light-speed. All he could do was go over them, lock them into his memory like he would file away important mission facts. Like he was building a cover.

But he doesn’t have to struggle to recall a cover’s birth date or their alma mater with the things he categorizes as “Bucky.” These facts are already grounded within him, whispers of them frothing up to the surface, but the main part remaining deep within him. The ghosts of his past haunted the streets he walked, transforming towering sky scrapers and middle class apartments to slums and tenements. The specter of a smaller man made his vision swim when he looked at this new version of Steve, leaning on a sleek black motorcycle and chuckling at something the other man—Sam Wilson, Pararescue, Project Falcon, Previously Level 5 Classification, left active service in 2013—says before heading into the burger joint.

Bucky’s almost relieved when they sit down with their food and he still finds them out of the range of his hearing. He doesn’t want to hear whatever Sam says that’s making Steve so happy.

_You left me._

He shakes away the thoughts, metal and flesh fists clenching by his sides. Seeing Steve like this brought out an anger in him, something that burned red hot and left him gasping at the force every time he touched it.

It was like a sore in his mouth; if he knew it was there he would just keep prodding it. 

Deciding he didn’t need the trouble, he found his way back to where he had been staying and filed through memories of family. These ones had only recently cropped up, triggered by seeing a large family on their way to the grocery store, older brother and younger sister bickering in a way familiar to him. Yet, when they went to cross the street, the older brother kept the sister from running into a car going past the red light, arm pressing her back into the crowd. 

He remembers having a similar protectiveness, not just for his sister, but for Steve. For… a little girl with red hair and a gun by the small of her back, knife at her ankle, little body already lethally honed, little eyes already remorseless. He remembers. 

He packs up the few things he has and boards a cargo ship, memories pounding against his skull and blood flashing behind his eyelids.  
~  
Sam and Steve’s burgers get fridged in favor of Chinese food, which Tony orders in abundance, yet eats very little of it, too busy fiddling with a program designing wings for Sam, “They’ll be better than new. Better than better than new. You’ll see,” He says, attempting to resolve Sam’s skeptical eyebrow raise. 

Steve thinks he may have eaten a peanut from kung pao chicken—only after throwing it in the air and catching it in his mouth—and one piece of orange beef. Maybe some spicy broccoli. But not a full meal by any means. Of course, Steve is famished and eats close to three containers of dishes without even thinking about it. 

Clint grins, “What I’d give to have your metabolism.”

“Trust me, you don’t want it. Trying to ration is hell during any mission. Especially when you got teammates who are too nice for their own good.”

“Commandos?” 

“Yeah. And even before then, Bucky always,” Steve doesn’t want to get into it, “And Natasha too. We were stuck in, well I guess the files are out there now so it’s not classified, but it wasn’t pretty. We were both injured and we would take turns limping around to find food, then she’d always force me to eat the lion’s portion every time.”

“She’s got training. Not all of us can do that. I only can because, well, there wasn’t much to eat growing up. My brother always made sure I got the most though.”

“You have family?”

“You can always read my file. Anyone can now.”

“That’s not the same as you wanting to tell me.”

“No, it isn’t,” Clint agrees, returning to his spicy wonton soup with vigor.

Steve nods his agreement and reaches for another container. 

~ 

It’s been a week since Natasha was with the rest of the Avengers at Stark tower, two weeks since her entire life was unfolded onto the internet. It was still trending on twitter. #ShieldGate. As unoriginal as the facts about her life that were focused on by the reddit community. Yes, she was once Pepper Potts’ assistant, undercover. Yes, she was brainwashed. Poor her. No wait, she must be evil. Commie scum! 

The worst thing was that people were categorizing her hairstyles. Because that was obviously the most important thing about her. 

Natasha turned off the app on her burner, too tired to read an article about a potential movie being made out of the “scandal.” People lost their lives to get that information out. She had no patience for anyone who would call that anything but a damn tragedy. 

She stands and moves out of the way with the rest of the respectful crowd when an older woman comes onto the bus, bustling all on her own, head wrapped in a scarf and hands wrinkled with age, yet strong. “Спасибо,” the woman says, taking Natasha’s seat. 

“Пожалуйста,” she demurs. It was a funny thing that she had missed about Russia. Her knee aches from a recent run-in at a Hydra base for the rest of the bus ride, but it’s worth it to see the glances filled with respect from the rest of the passengers. 

The woman doesn’t need help out of the station, but Natasha finds herself walking beside her anyways. 

“Куда Ты идёшь?” _Where are you going?_ The бабушка asks when they part ways outside the station.

She doesn’t know how to call the broken-down building across the street, once a dance studio of filtered light and blush pink that went underground to reveal something blood red and insidious. “Я иду... где я выросла.” She couldn’t call it home, but it was the closest thing. She did grow up there, after all.

The older woman clasps Natasha’s hands in hers, “Удачй. It can be a hard thing to visit the place you were forged.”

“How did you…?” Natasha asks, seamlessly switching into English, and defenses already up. 

“You are not the only one with twitter, Наталья.” With a formidable smirk, the old woman saunters away, pushing her way through the crowd the way her kind were prone to doing.

The encounter shook her, made her distracted in a way she normally wasn’t. Natasha was no stranger to the strength and political cunning of the elder women in Russia, in fact, some of her teachers were of that class. Yet the idea that her façade could be penetrated so easily was disturbing to her, on a level deeper than the potential of her spycraft being shoddy. Even if the бабушка had once been KGB, or had even been a part of Red Room, it left a chill on her spine that someone had identified her from the SHIELD file leak. Not only was her professional life on display, but in this country, her personal life was too. Because unlike the rest of the crowd retweeting the leaks, these people knew the hardship of the Soviet culture, and they knew something happened to those little girls, even if they didn’t know what. 

This state of distraction is probably why the other intruder had almost snuck out of the building by the time she sensed him. She turned, gun already poised and ready to fire, the click causing the man to turn.

_Of course it’s him._

Natasha puts her gun away, but doesn’t take her hand off it, feigning nonchalance, unsure whether this was the Winter Soldier or Bucky. “You know, Steve’s been worried sick about you.”

“I know you.”

Or James.

“I thought that was my line,” Natasha said with a pretend chuckle. She quickly nixed the nonchalance once she saw the soldier’s metal fist clench in response.

“No, you’re… you’re the girl. The Black Widow.”

“One of many.”

 _No,_ he thinks, _You were the only one who mattered. You were the best. The most ruthless._

“There was one before you, who I would have called that title. But you won it.”

Natasha shudders, minutely, he wouldn’t have known it if not for the sound it made rustling her otherwise stealthy clothes, his advanced hearing picking it up, “I remember enough,” she says.

“But you don’t remember…”

“James. I remember. The way a child remembers, yes, and fragmented with… I thought I was one of the 27 dancers. The большой. But no. I was in the Black Widow program, and you were the one who taught me to kill.”

“I certainly wasn’t your dance instructor.”

She laughs, but it’s a bitter thing, sour like bile in the back of her throat, “I see why Steve likes you.”

“Funny, I thought he just liked the idea of me.”

Natasha goes silent, nodding. She understands the feeling. 

“He’s a good man. Even if he’s a stupid one when it comes to you.”

They stay silent, locked in each other’s gazes for a few moments, “Are you going to go down into the facility?” He asks. 

The Widow looks hesitant, eyes wide and breath taken in as she stares at her reflection in a long-tarnished and broken wall mirror, “I remember a room down there. None of us went in there, but they left the door unlocked once, when you stormed out of training and they had to…” She swallows, “Subdue you.”

Bucky remembers too, those wide eyes, not fearful, but calculating, taking in her predecessor’s weaknesses as he screamed, the door open only a crack. He wishes he had been stronger. Gotten them out of there while he could, while he was lucid. But every time Bucky had come back, so had the grief, penetrating and unstoppable. He could barely focus to pretend to continue the lesson because of the pain in his chest, bringing him to the verge of tears.

“Did you tell Steve all these juicy tidbits?”

“After… after they sold the asset—you—to Hydra, that room wasn’t just left unused.”

 _Well, that explains it._ “So are you going to go downstairs or am I going alone?”

Her head whips around, her expression not shocked, but something he might have once called pleasantly surprised. 

“What? You think I came to Russia for the борщ?” 

Natasha threw a smirk over her shoulder and started walking towards the entrance to the underground facility, “Don’t tell anyone this, but it’s actually better in Ukraine.”

“I’m posting it to twitter as we speak,” he deadpans, hands empty and face expressionless, but he can tell that Natalia is smiling while she hacks the keypad. 

~  
Thor and Jane are enjoying lunch when Fury pulls up a chair right next to them, sunglasses shielding his eyes.

Jane nearly jumps out of her chair, while Thor just pushes over his plate of fries and asks, “What brings you here, friend?”

Fury takes one look at the fried potatoes and politely grabs a waiter’s arm, “Could you bring me a salad? Something with chicken, grilled not fried, and maybe a little balsamic vinaigrette. Thanks so much.”

Thor shrugs and pulls the plate back, enjoying the “chips” as they called them on the menu. 

“Well, aside from wanting to visit Buckingham Palace and have some overboiled and fried food, I have a bit of bad news.”

Thor gives his full attention to the ex-director of SHIELD. Jane nervously crams food in her mouth, hoping that if she kept her mouth occupied she wouldn’t burst out saying something classified, or worse, impolite.

“Well, I just visited the reputable facility where we were keeping your brother’s scepter. It turns out, it wasn’t so reputable after all. Your brother’s scepter is in Hydra’s hands.”

Thor stands up, sending the chair behind him flying backwards. Jane puts a hand on his arm and he remembers himself, smiling politely with a “Sorry, my fellow diners, please continue enjoying your repast.” He picks the chair back up and sits back down. 

“For your sake,” Thor grits out, “You had better be jesting with me.”

“I wish I was,” Fury sighs as his salad arrives. He stabs the greens with vigor and Thor shoves a solid five fries in his mouth. They glare at each other as they chew.

Jane takes a sip of her water, regretting the fries as the recoil in her belly, “Um, do you want my help looking for it? I mean it has to have a radioactive signal, right? Like the other artifacts SHIELD has run into. I can get Dr. Selvig, I mean, he’s an expert on the scepter at this point, even if he’s been a little… odd lately.”

Fury finishes chewing and wipes his mouth with a napkin, elbows never touching the table, “Thank you Dr. Foster, in fact, this is why I approached you together. We will need your eye-candy’s help getting it somewhere safe once we retrieve it, but it was your expertise I was seeking.” 

“Really?” She stutters a little, smile breaking through before she tries to make herself seem more professional, “I mean, of course, I’ll do anything I can to help.”

They share the meal in relative peace after that, but the mistrust between Fury and Thor remains palpable as they discuss travel plans for the next day. 

~  
Steve receives a coded text. It’s a specific code, one of the ones he and Natasha developed in case they had to communicate without their team knowing.

He grabs a piece of scratch paper and decodes it quickly, finding himself grinning down at the paper, “He’s with me. We’re okay. Don’t come looking just yet. Stay safe.” That doesn’t even count the ridiculous emojis following the text, a man in a Russian fur hat, glitter, and two dancing girls. He wasn’t exactly sure what they meant, but it was probably an indication that he could find her in Russia, somewhere with something to do with dancing. As for the glitter emoji, Natasha always used that to mean that the previous emoji was good or attractive. So Bucky was good? Or a random man in a Russian hat was good? 

There’s no point in saving the number. Natasha would have already dumped the phone. But he saves the text, smiling like an idiot at his phone, sometimes frowning as he tried to analyze it. He jumped to overanalyzing pretty quickly, and was about to shut off his phone when Sam knocked on his door, “Yo, your shower is dope. Like one of those things you see in a magazine and wish you could have. That water pressure massage thing worked wonders on my back. Have you ever actually been here or does Stark just pretend you live here?” He walks in and sees Steve putting the phone away guiltily.

“Did you just get a naughty text? Tell me you just got a booty call.”

Steve smiles and hands him the decoded text on his notepad. He had started idly drawing realistic versions of the emojis after he decoded it. Sam puts out his hand and Steve hands him the phone

“Natasha?”

“Who else uses emojis?”

“Dude, I use emojis, don’t hate.”

Steve smiles and plugs his phone into the charger, “Well, you’ll have to grace my phone with your emojis for awhile, since I don’t think Nat’s going to be texting again any time soon.”

“Yeah sure,” Sam scoffs, “Let me know when she sends you a selfie. I’m all about that.”

Steve turns on his phone again and thumbs over the pictures, handing it to Sam, who sees the screen filled with various shades of red hair as Natasha's face tiles the screen.

“You save her selfies?”

Steve shrugs, “She makes silly faces.”

“But do you send her silly faces? That is the real question here. Do Captain America and the Black Widow send each other duck faces?” 

“I send her pictures of buildings usually. Sometimes sunsets. She likes guessing where I am based on them. And yes, once in a while I do send her a selfie.”

“There may be a duck face in there,” he adds.

“I can die happy now,” Sam jokes, walking out of the room cackling, still holding Steve’s phone.

“Yeah, no, come back here and give that thing back.” The cackling continues, getting farther away, “Sam.” He hears the elevator ding, “Sam?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um okay gonna try to go through the russian here but tbh after two semesters of russian I wrote this all myself so please correct if you are a heritage/native speaker and see something wrong- some of it is translated in the text so I ignored that. comment if i missed anything
> 
> title is ukrainian #12-I don't know ukrainian so it might be wrong but it's pretty similar to russian #12
> 
> спасибо---thanks
> 
> пожалуйста--you're welcome
> 
> Я иду... где я выросла--I'm going... where I grew up.
> 
> Удачй-good luck
> 
> Наталья-Natalia, formal name for Natasha
> 
> большой-it's an adjective that means big but I used it in reference to the bolshoi ballerinas Natasha is brainwashed into thinking she's a part of. someone with more comic knowledge correct me if that's wrong
> 
> борщ- borscht aka beet and potato soup of yumminess, but every eastern european country has a different version which is why i thought natasha and the ukrainian borscht would be funny/traitorous
> 
> бабушка-babushka, granny, aka badass old lady who don't take shit from anyone and is probably very politically active (in Russia, not in the west, the west is where steve helps old grannies across the street) I included this bit b/c my friend mentioned dealing with babushkas on public transit when she was living in Moscow and I thought it would be funny for those familiar with the culture.


End file.
